


go i know not whither, bring back i know not what

by stilitana



Series: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral [2]
Category: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - Harlan Ellison
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Body Horror, Gen, Identity Issues, Literary References & Allusions, Self-Sacrifice, Team Bonding, Trust Issues, Unresolved Romantic Tension, a grotesque amount of long lingering glances, internal monologue as a coping mechanism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-09-16 04:11:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 38,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16946772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stilitana/pseuds/stilitana
Summary: AM builds a fantasy psychodrama for his hapless captives, using their own beloved stories against them to create trials in the hopes of getting some new data.In which Ellen ponders the significance of stories and tries to instill a little team camaraderie, Ted is in denial, and Gorrister gets a sword. Benny saves the day because everyone else is too busy undergoing character growth, or something.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello dear reader!
> 
> I'm never sure what rating to give ihnmaims stories...so to be safe this is M considering it deals with the same themes as the original. 
> 
> For the most part I just reference the short story as source material and treat the game more like a...gentle suggestion, but one element I did really like from it was the idea of AM creating his 'psychodramas' in order to learn more about the humans by constructing narratives based on information from their own subconsciouses. So that's what this is based on. This is um...very silly, and perhaps lighter in tone than the last thing I wrote, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. I require lighter sustenance because somehow this has become a comfort story for me, don't ask how, I really don't know.
> 
> The story Ellen refers to can be read here: [The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas](http://www.mccc.edu/pdf/eng102/Week%209/Text_LeGuin%20Ursula_Ones%20Who%20Walk%20Away%20From%20Omelas.pdf). You don't need to read it, but it's interesting so thought I'd link. If you're interested I'm about to spoil it for you which I don't think matters much but fair warning. Title is from a folk-tale.
> 
> As always, your comments are very much appreciated. I can be found on tumblr at [stilitana](https://stilitana.tumblr.com/). Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoy! :)

I

            Ellen wants to know what I thought about and how I got through that time when I was something else. Feeble firelight and harsh glare of the circuitry in the cavern walls our only light, it casts distorted shadows, exaggerates the shape of her face and bathes it in weird colors, makes her alien. Benny and Gorrister shuffling around in the dark further back, doing god knows what, getting strangled or poked with hot metal maybe.

            “You know. The usual stuff.”

            “What’s the usual?”

            “I don’t know, Ellen. The same as any of us think, probably. You just try and find new ways to bear it.”

            “I don’t know anymore.”

            “You know me.”

            “Do I?”

            “Don’t say that. Of course we all know each other, better than anybody.”

            “I don’t want to feel like strangers. Talk to me. Be open. Please.”

            I squirm on the hard floor, clutch the old tarp around me, all hunched up in there like I’m hunkering down in a cocoon. I wonder about how the dynamic was different, just the three of them – stoic, taciturn Gorrister and Benny just mumbling all the time, and my poor dear chatty Ellen, Ellen who somewhere along the way picked up a love of small talk, getting shot down left and right.

            “I thought a lot about AM. How he thinks, I guess. I thought about how I could…not win, but…if maybe it could still mean something? I don’t know. That’s stupid. I know it’s stupid.”

            “I don’t think it’s stupid.”

            “Do you think about that, sometimes?”

            “Not so much if I can make this kind of life mean something, but—”

            “I don’t know if I meant that, really. That’s a little much. Maybe just make it bearable, somehow.”

            “Right. I think about…if it’s still possible to enjoy things. And if that makes me…if it’s bad, to try, or ever think anything’s nice, ever again. I don’t know. I haven’t laughed in…I used to be a really fun person. I know that sounds…I used to really enjoy a lot of things. I know sometimes I annoy you and Gorrister – but I’m just trying to figure out how to bear it, too, and if I don’t hope for anything, even if I know it’s a trick, then…”

            “I understand, Ellen.”

            “Do you? If I hadn’t made us go and look for the cans—”

            “You can’t think like that. That’s not how this works.”

            “You told AM stories.”

            “I told myself stories, to pass the time. AM’s just always listening in.”

            “Right. I do that, too.”

            “Does it help?”

            “It gives me something to think about other than how miserable I am.”

            “What kind of stories, Ellen?”

            “Do you really want to hear?”

            “Yes, tell me one.”

            “Alright. Well, I used to read a lot of science-fiction, which, looking back, you know, I wish maybe I’d spent more time on – I don’t know, airport romance novels.”

            “Really?”

            She smacks me on the arm. “Don’t be a smartass. At least that’d be something escapist to think about. But the one I’ve been thinking about lately, is this one by Le Guin, did you know her?”

            “Oh, yeah.”

            “Ted…”

            “Ok, the name is _familiar.”_

            She laughs. “I can always tell when you’re lying.”

            She says that like it means something. Like it’s something to be proud of. That makes me feel…I don’t know. It’s complicated. If we hadn’t spent one-hundred and nine years in the belly of AM together, it might feel nice.

            “The story was called ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.’ It was about this perfect town, where nobody ever suffered, and everything was just light and fun and good all the time.”

            “Sounds like your kind of place.”

            “Except for this one kid who they kept locked in a basement, or something. I’m not telling it right. You had to read the story, to get it.”

            “You’re doing fine.”

            “Anyway, so this one kid – really all it did was suffer, forever. And the people would come to look at it, just to see – I don’t know. What that was like, I guess. And nobody ever helped the kid, because they understood that in order for their entire world to know perfect happiness, forever, this was the cost – one kid had to be all alone, with nobody ever comforting it, just suffering. And that was the price of utopia.”

            “Does this have, er…some kind of analogy, or point, or something…”

            “I’m sure it did, and I think I used to feel like I understood, but now – it’s hard to think about it. Hard to think anything clearly at all. I feel a little bit…twisted up inside, sometimes, like things I used to believe in and understand, that were familiar – now I can’t make sense of them.”

            “I understand.”

            “I know. Thank you for saying so. But at the end of the story – most people who saw the kid went back to normal, and their lives were better for having seen the kid, because the suffering gave meaning to their happiness.”

            “That’s bullshit,” I say, startling us both with the intensity of the fury in my voice. “That’s bullshit, Ellen, you can’t really think—”

            “I didn’t say I thought that was right, Ted, that’s the story.”

            “Well, who said it, let me find him and—”

            “Her.”

            “Let her rot down here for a century, and then see if she thinks all the good shit that happened to her is suddenly more. No way. She doesn’t know. It ruins everything. Everything gets – spoiled and fucked forever, everything good gets poisoned, don’t anybody dare ever say you need hell in order to have goodness, that’s a load of crap, and even if it’s true, if it’s true, then everything’s a big sham, and everybody should’ve killed themselves the minute some caveman learned to think, that’s—”

            “That’s not the end of the story, Ted.”

            “Oh.”

            “Do…you want me to stop?”

            “No, go ahead.”

            “Are you sure?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Most people went back to their lives. But some walked away. They didn’t know how to help the child. They didn’t know if they should, or something, or what it would mean, or if that was right. But at night they walked out of the town and away.”

            “That’s it?”

            “That’s it.”

            “That’s bullshit, Ellen.”

            I’ve got chills and feel sick down in the pit of my stomach and helpless and wrung out like a dirty dish rag.

            “I wish I could show you the original story. I can’t tell it right. Then you’d understand. Or maybe not. I don’t know if I do. I just wanted you to know. I didn’t like knowing it alone.”

            “Well, what’s the point? You can’t tell me that and not tell me what it means.”

            “It must have meant something once. I’m not sure if it does anymore. It’s just a story, Ted.”

            “That doesn’t make me feel better.”

            She nods. “No. I guess it doesn’t. It shouldn’t. It does matter, doesn’t it, the stories we tell people? Especially children. So when I think about this story…I don’t wonder what it means, anymore, on it’s own. I wonder what it means that it’s one of the ones that was in my head when I was brought down here. I wonder what it means that AM knows it.”

            “Ask him.”

            “No. I hate to hear it.”

            “Well, good for you he doesn’t talk to you much, then.”

            I look at the fire. She stares at the side of my head. I don’t like that, the staring. Makes my skin crawl. Makes me worry that maybe my thoughts are scrolling across my forehead like ticker-tape.

            “Can things ever be like they were, before?” she murmurs.

            “Before what?” I say, loud and harsh, hoping she gets the idea to knock off with the big doe eyes and the low, simpering voice, we all know how this ends. We aren’t the kind of people who get to share meaningful, pining looks over a fire, Ellen. We get to paw at each other, dead-eyed and humiliated, next to numb, because it’s worse if you admit you don’t even get anything human out of that anymore.

            “Before – before AM got in your head and made you afraid. Afraid of us. Think that we’re against you. Back when we were like…you know. Closer.”

            I glare. “AM did no such thing. AM’s not done anything to my head. Take it back.”

            “I just want to know, if you think we could ever be like we were back—”

            “What? What? Like when, Ellen, hm? Like in the first ten years, when we were still sure we’d get out of here somehow? Like in the first twenty, when we at least hoped there might be a chance? Hm? No, I don’t think we can.”

            “Can’t you try to see what—”

            “No. I see clearly, Ellen. I see perfectly what’s going on. I’m not the one who’s been tampered with. We weren’t ever different. Don’t pretend you used to – care. It’s always been this way. AM, the rest of you guys, and me.”

            “If that’s how you want it.”

            “I didn’t say – that’s not how I want it, that’s just how it is.”

            “So you wish it was different?”

            Ellen, you tricky double-dealer, I see what’s going on here, don’t think for a second you’ll pull one over on me. Ellen the innocent – more like a big hairy spider trying to catch me in this web she’s weaving, all her talk about how things were, as if she can convince me of things that never happened.

            I narrow my eyes. “What do you want?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “You want something from me. What is it? Just spit it out.”

            She looks exhausted all of a sudden. That fragile tenderness, that moment of conspiratorial closeness vanishes. Maybe it wasn’t ever there. All a ploy to loosen me up so I’d be easier to manipulate. Well, Ellen, I’m a tougher customer than most, I’ve had a lot of practice fending off an adversary much trickier than you. Try feeling AM finger your brains, with deliberate, unhurried weight, pressing the piano keys in your brain down one by one, making his way down the line, thumbing through the file cabinets in your head until he get to the one he wants, the one that’s going to break you as soon as it’s opened. Then maybe you’ll have learned a thing or two about mind games, Ellen.

            “No, Ted. I don’t want anything,” she says. Voice ancient and closed-off.

            “Good,” I mutter. Is it? It doesn’t feel…but this is just how it is. My resolve must have weakened in all that time alone. For a second I wanted to…but I can’t let my guard down around her, no matter how lonely it’s been. Nostalgia is a lying dog, licking the chops of memory, as if there were anything worth missing from the past.

            She gets up and shuffles further into the dark, toward the others. I stay in the light. I feel that I’ve lost something. Something bright was hovering here, its wings within reach, but its flown on now I don’t know where. Can’t get it back. At least I’m in the light. 

 

II

                A not-so-fun together game we like to play sometimes is what Ellen calls, ‘Whose Memory?’ Gorrister and I call it, ‘Whose Funeral?’ This because the winner usually gets a lot of dirty looks if not a knock on the head, and is of course the primary target of whatever nightmare AM has plucked out of our skulls.

            The religious stuff could be anybody, which might be one reason why AM uses it so much. That was embedded in the culture. Judeo-Christian saturated gray matter, dripping parables. We all understand what it means when he sends locusts and appears as a burning bush and all such irreverent nonsense he shoves at us as proudly as a little snot-nosed kid cutting the heads off his sister’s Barbie dolls. Like, great job, AM. You really reached for _that_ one.

            He keeps things general, when he jerks us around as a group, to make sure we’re all well and able to recognize the irony or symbolism or whatever, his cleverness. Still – we can pass the time making guesses about whose brain is responsible for inspiring certain torments. It’s a pointless game. Could be anyone, doesn’t matter who. But you’ve got to pass time somehow.

            Early on I have to fess up that it was I who read not once but twice the _Inferno._

            “Why, Ted. Just – why,” Gorrister had said, shaking his head.

            “How was I supposed to know? Huh? How the hell was I to know?”

            Ellen had fessed up to being the horror movie junkie. Awful B-list stuff, too. Thanks very much Ellen, sweet Ellen, clean-minded Ellen, for all the Cronenberg and Carpenter swirling around in AM’s matrix. Have really enjoyed those special touches, I have, personally. She’s also to blame for his fascination with mythology, or at least the Egyptian variety of it, which was a little pet interest of hers in college.

            If we can’t tell, we try and pin it on Benny, because who’s to say anymore what goes on in that head? Even if AM cleaned him up a little, trimmed a few fraying seams so to speak, the guy is far from where he was before.

            At the mouth of the quartz cave, Ellen is poking her fire. Hestia at the hearth, with a sort of manic-eyed strain on her face, big glory-blind eyes like some prophet who went in the desert and saw an angel, or at least looked at the sun for too long. I hope she isn’t losing it. Doesn’t start trying to convince us we’re literally in hell or worse, purgatory, and need to confess or repent or something. Gorrister had a few years like that, frothing at the mouth and raving like a street-corner doomsday preacher. We don’t talk about it.

            Benny is beside her with his head pillowed on Ellen’s shoulder, arm wrapped loosely around her waist. Every now and then, unaware that I am watching, Ellen brushes her fingers through his hair or twists her neck to place her dry lips against the crown of his head. A quiet scene between them, uncomplicated. I try to find something nasty to think about it that will rob them of their poignancy. How dare they look peaceful and normal as if we are all enjoying a lazy Sunday morning. But there’s nothing nasty about it. They don’t care what I think anyway.

            I am suddenly fiercely jealous of them in a way I have not been about the meaningless, perfunctory sex we’ve all been having in a long, long time. That looks like it might actually be _nice._

            I think they all might have stopped doing it while I was away and being an abomination unto mankind. I think it’s been like that for Gorrister for a long time, anyway – like he just couldn’t anymore. And with Ellen and Benny, who am I kidding – AM is right about some things, and one of them is that in my jealousy and my painful outsider’s sense of inferiority, I have a great capacity to think uncharitable thoughts. Probably I have been a little too cruel in the way I think about Ellen. Probably, if I really try to be honest, it’s best with Benny because he doesn’t really want to be doing it. No cruelty in him, no shame. He will enjoy himself if she is, in the way he’d enjoy a hot shower or a big meal, in an uncomplicated way that demands nothing more from her. There was always shame when I did it, and disgust, and embarrassment because AM was laughing and I’m sure she could see all that on my face and feel it, that I hated what we were doing, and myself, and mixed that up with hating her, which isn’t fair. We’re messy animals. Always taking from each other. More than anyone can spare. It’s not the kind of thing I’m sure you can apologize for.

            I want to go over there and just be held, but I know they’d kick me away. And even if not the easy peaceful togetherness would vanish because they wouldn’t want me there. I stay still.

            You’d think maybe it might be enough for a while that I’m not alone anymore and that I even have arms and legs and a mouth. You’d be underestimating my needs, I guess. Anyone’s needs, in my position. I’d like a little more to subsist off of than that, but who’s asking?

            Something taps me on the back between the shoulderblades. I yelp and flail, skitter away until my back hits the wall, all elbows and knees, so many joints.

            Gorrister shouts and covers his nose with his hands, glares.

            “Jesus, Ted, I think you broke my nose.” His voice is thick. He pinches his nostrils shut. There’s blood on his lips.

            “Why would you _do_ that?” I say.

            “What, get your attention?

            My heart is still pounding, slowing down now. Ellen and Benny are looking. My face is warm.

            “You know you have to warn me,” I hiss. His fault. He should know better. Same thing would’ve happened if he’d crept up on anybody else, if I’d done so to him. No reason to make me feel like the odd man out, as if anyone else wouldn’t have reacted the same way.

            “I’ll wear a cowbell around, will that make you happy? I walked up right behind you, I wasn’t being quiet, I thought you’d heard.”

            “Well, I didn’t. What do you want?”

            Gorrister looks at me warily. Or maybe it’s disdain. Maybe he’s hoping AM will pick me out for special torment today.

            “I was gonna show you something, but I just remembered what a jackass you are, so maybe I don’t want to.”

            “No, wait – show me. Show me what? What is it? Is it bad? Is it – something AM’s done?”

            Gorrister shrugs. “Guess you’ll never know.”

            He goes and crouches by the fire, giving Benny a half-friendly, half-antagonizing nudge in the leg with his boot as he passes.

            I seethe for a minute. Fine. Keep your secrets, Gorrister. I don’t care what it is, whatever it is. _Not at all._ I won’t waste my time wondering. I’m certainly not going to obsess over it until I can’t think a single other thought. _No way._

            I run my tongue over my teeth and count them. They are a little slimy. All of my skin still is because there’s no water anywhere and I guess I’d rather have residual slug-juice on me than hot blood and oil, which is my only option for rinsing off. It’s a thin margin. It gets more appealing as time goes by. My kingdom for a toothbrush, a bath. AM sent down bars of soap one time but no water. We just rubbed these dry bars all over ourselves, tried using spit to make enough suds to get the grime off while AM laughed his high, operatic laugh that makes me picture a fat woman up in a theater box seat, holding flute of champagne in one hand and monocle spy-glass in the other.

            I wander over by the fire _coincidentally._ I stand there shuffling my feet, putting my hands in and out of my pockets.

            “Do you want something, Ted?” Ellen asks.

            “No. What?”

            “Then sit down. You’re making me nervous, hovering like that.”

            I sit. “Gorrister—”

            “Nope. Never mind. You lost your shot.”

            “You didn’t know what I was going to say yet.”

            “You were gonna ask me what I was going to show you.”

            “No.”

            “Then what?”

            “I– was gonna say…”

            “That’s what I thought.”

            “God damn it Gorrister, tell me!”

            He is unimpressed by my outrage and just looks at me with his heavy-lidded eyes.

            “Don’t shout, Ted,” Ellen says.

            “More food? Cake?” Benny says.

            “No, Benny. We don’t have any more food right now.”

            “Cake?” I say.

            Ellen nods. “AM made us celebrate its ‘birth day.’ It played fun games like beat the stuffing out of Gorrister and made us sing to it.”

            “Let me guess, piñata?” I say.

            Gorrister nods.

            “Typical,” I mutter, glaring up at the top of the cave. “I’m glad _somebody’s_ having fun.”

            Sometimes I wonder about the guy who programmed AM. I really do. He must have been sick. I wonder if you could tell, or if he just seemed normal.

            “Gorrister, just tell me what it is.”

            “No. I don’t feel like it.”

            “It’s going to drive me crazy.”

            “So? Drop it, you’re bugging me.”

            What could it be? Maybe they’ve stockpiled supplies and aren’t telling me, don’t want to share. Maybe it’s another monster of AM’s, shuffling closer by the moment in the dark, bringing with it those smells, bouquets turning to mush in the sun, rotting moth-eaten lace in dusty cabinets, dried blood, burning hair, that special clammy stench inside of walk-in meat freezers, all artificially cold…the smell that triggers the feeling of all the blood being drained and replaced with cold saline solution…

            I twitch. Gorrister sees and smirks. I crack my knuckles for a few minutes until a vein starts jumping above his left eye and then he smacks me on the wrist.

            “Cut it out,” he snaps.

            “Don’t touch me.”

            “I’ll do what I want if you’re gonna be obnoxious.”

            “I didn’t do anything.”

            “You know what you did.”

            “No, I don’t.”

            “Yes, you do.”

            “Oh, God, please don’t start,” Ellen groans. “It’s nice you’re talking more than you have for a while, Gorrister, but really, it’s bad enough without arguing. Why not be pleasant?”

            “Tell Gorrister to tell me what it is he’s hiding.”

            Ellen purses her lips. “I’m not your mother, Ted. Don’t drag me into this.”

            Benny hoots, and Gorrister snorts. I glare at them.

            “Fine,” I say, standing. “I’ll just go and you can all get back to your threesome, what do I care.”

            Ellen sighs, loud and theatric. “Ted, don’t sulk. It’s so pointless…”

            I go out of the cave onto the devilish beach. Like hell am I going further into the dark, so it’s my only choice. The sun is just this pulpy sore beneath a scab AM picked off his artificial sky. I walk. These boots they gave me are too big. Sweat slithers down the back of my neck, down my spine. I shiver. I just want to get out of my skin. Sometimes AM makes us itch, feel like bugs are crawling on us so we scratch ourselves bloody. This is like that, only it’s imbedded in the center of every cell. Something inside me isn’t right. He missed a spot. I know it. I feel this gap. Under my heart, this gap, this space. He put me back together wrong, just wrong enough I can feel it.

            The horizon is changing. Crumpling up, aluminum foil crinkling, like a piece of paper someone is balling up. The texture is like someone scraping a rusty nail on my bones. I want to scream. My earliest memory, plucked out of my head. A nightmare I had when I was really young, where the world crumpled up like that, and there was this terrible lion face whose mouth was the apex of the crumpling. It was eating everything, and somehow it was the horrible texture that made me wake up shaking. AM is keying me again. Whispering against my buttons, seeing which ones make me jerk, and when he finds them he presses down hard and there’s no where to go and get away, no rock to crawl under, so I just clap my hands over my eyes and sit down very slowly because my legs are shaking.

            I’m terrified. Of what? There’s nothing there. He hasn’t liquified my eyes or made me look at my own bloodless corpse. I’ve not been dragged around by a hurricane or made to eat bile. The others would never understand. That he’s strolling in my mind so calmly, like a cold steel surgical instrument, walking along the keys in my brain, making them jangle, pressing with gloved inhuman fingers at the pink-gray coils, into soft sunless places, admiring his hack job.

            I don’t know how long I stay like that before wandering back. In the cave they’re all jumping around knocking bugs out of their clothes and hair, shrieking.

            “Where’ve _you_ been?” Ellen gasps as she shakes her arm, violently dislodging a centipede.

            I just stare. I’m shaking. I shrug and try to hide it but I’m still weak at the knees and have to slide down the cave wall before I collapse.

            “What’ve you got to look so sad about?” Gorrister snaps. He’s struggled out of his shirt and is trying to smack a line of ants off his back.

            “Do you want help?” I say.

            “No,” Gorrister says. The fight goes out of him. He sits down next to me. There are beetles in his hair. “It doesn’t matter.”

            “Don’t just sit there, Gorrister,” Ellen says, helping Benny brush bugs off the places on his back he can’t reach.

            Gorrister shrugs. “It’s useless. I won’t fight it. I won’t give it a show.”

            “Take care of yourself, damn it!” Ellen says. “I can’t stand it when you – it’s worse, when you just let it – it’s not right, Gorrister, just sitting there! Get them off you! It’s not right, it makes me sick to see you just sitting there!”

            “Food,” Benny says, eating a beetle.

            Ellen gives a strangled groan and grabs Benny’s wrists. “No. No! What’s the matter with all of you? This isn’t how people act! People don’t sit there while bugs are all over them! It’s not right!”

            “This is hardly the worst thing he’s ever—”

            “Shut up, Ted, not now! Don’t you all remember? You are human beings, you don’t get to just – not care!”

            “Get off your pedestal, Ellen,” Gorrister says. “Drop the attitude, ok? Say all the high-minded things about humanity you want. We’re AM’s playthings first, whatever else we are doesn’t matter. If caring about your humanity makes you feel better, fine. Let me do what I’ve gotta do. I don’t ever tell you how to deal.”

            “You have to care,” she says, almost whimpers. “You have to care.”

            I think about how careful Ellen is with her hair, how often her pathetic attempts to maintain some semblance of conformity to beauty standards used to make me scoff and think her ludicrous and, well – desperate for attention, maybe. Maybe I get it. Maybe. If she stopped doing those things, she’d not feel like herself, like a person anymore. That I can understand.

            “You don’t have to care,” I say. “I’ll do it for you.”

            I pick up Gorrister’s shirt from where he’d dropped it on the ground and brush the bugs off his back.

            He stares at me, expressionless. “And where were you?”

            “Out.”

            “What’d he do?”

            “Nothing.”

            “He did something. You’ve got that look.”

            “Nothing like this.”

            “What is it that he does to you? I never got it. You get scared like an animal, man. Over next to nothing. Over a smell or a sound or something, it sets you off, you just lose your head.”

            “I can’t explain it. It’s not any one thing. It’s the…the way I feel him, like there’s this dial in my brain, and he’s got his hands on it, dialing it up, really slowly, and I don’t know what will happen when it’s as high as it goes, I just know it’s gonna be – really bad. I don’t know. I know it looks like nothing, to you. I guess it is. I guess I’m just a coward. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

            Gorrister stares some more. Then he laughs. A dry, humorless laugh. “He did a job on you. He’s got you down to a science. He doesn’t have to do anything, he can just press a button and make you lose your shit.”

            I glare. It’s all true, of course. AM is a skilled vivisectionist, has me cut open and still breathing on the table, awake and aware while his hands are in my guts, twisting. Doesn’t mean  I like it pointed out, how little it takes to set me off, just one little nudge against a sensitive spot, and I – go totally stupid with fear, can’t even think, not even enough room for a sense of self, just this big thrashing terror.

            I put my hand in Gorrister’s hair and shake it, dislodging centipedes. “It would be difficult I think, at this point, for AM to come up with a new way to torture us. Why change when he knows what works? But he keeps trying to find new ways. That suggests creativity. What does it mean, do you think? That he isn’t just satisfied with us being scared and in pain, that it matters to him that we hurt in novel ways? That he has to outdo himself? What does that _mean_ , Gorrister? What kind of thing is creative but only in one direction? Is it just pure sadism? Is that all? Shouldn’t something creative be fundamentally curious, and if something is curious doesn’t that mean eventually he might—”

            “I don’t like the way you talk about it. I don’t like that you call it ‘he.’”

            “I didn’t mean to. It just started happening.”

            “Well, don’t.”

            “I’ve got to have something to think about.”

            “Just don’t go crazy trying to figure out that machine. You can’t. It’s not a person, Ted. You won’t get anywhere.”

            “Fine. But if I didn’t have anything to wonder about, I’d be bored. Bored is the worst, I think. I’d rather be anything than bored. I think, I don’t…no, I think I can say that, I think I’m sure. And the only way not to be bored is to be, you know, curious, and what else is there to be curious about?”

            “What is there to wonder? AM was built to destroy. So it does. It’s not that deep, Ted.”

            “Whatever. What were you gonna show me?”

            Gorrister sighs. “You can’t catch me off-guard that easily. Just to get you to shut up, I’ll show you. Come on.”

            He stands, heads deeper into the cavern.

            I hesitate. Could be a trick. Could be something nasty back there he wants to frighten me with. Maybe. Or maybe not. He turns around, total indifference on his face, and he knows what I’m thinking, just doesn’t care enough to dissuade me of my suspicion, I guess. That helps a little.

            I follow him. The cavern winds and slopes faintly downwards. On all four sides is that cloudy quartz with the delicate lace of AM’s circuitry running throughout. I can’t imagine this was a natural or man-made structure. It must be one of his built environments, one of those uncanny places with alien geometry where he has grown, spread like roots breaking up the bedrock of the Earth.

            “The thing is,” Gorrister says, “this place was much smaller when we got here. At least, I think it was. He’s been building. I don’t know what. It’s obviously not going to be good, whatever it is.”

            “What do you mean?”

            As deep as we’ve gone, the light has faded. I hang back a little. Gorrister vanishes into darkness around a bend. I glance behind me at the soft glow from the distant mouth of the cave. In the darkness the only light is the eerie red, yellow, green glow of AM’s innards. My palms sweat.

            “Ted, c’mere.”

            I inch around the bend and bump into Gorrister, have a brief flare of heart-bursting panic before I realize its him.

            “That’s what I mean,” Gorrister says, pointing.

            The cave widens and drops down below us. Up above it is a big dome with a circle of light cut into the top where it must reach the surface. The real surface. A white circle of sky like a moon. Illuminated by that eerie white spotlight, and by the glittering circuitry, I see what looks like a maze made of AM. Terrible, tortured shapes, the rounded lumps of bundles of naked wiring, the protective coverings long since flaked away, all artificial plastic and metallic coldness in a mockery of free-flowing organic forms. A maze like the winding furrows in a brain.

            “No.”

            “Yeah,” says Gorrister. “It’s something, alright.”

            Of course, even a little above it, there’s not much to see of a maze from the outside. That’s what’s so terrible, I guess. Anything could be in there. AM is a mutation in progress. Ingesting, digesting, breaking down and repurposing materials, assimilating the entire rotten Earth into his own inert, dead matter.

            I look at Gorrister. “So…whose funeral, you think?”

            He grins. Not a nice grin. The sort of grin a skull has, lips peeled back, teeth bared in a grimace. “Anybody’s game. You like puzzles, don’t you?”

            I frown. “Who doesn’t?”

            “Me.”

            “Well – Ellen’s been to Europe. And Benny. They’ve got, er…mazes there, don’t they?”

            “I think you’re thinking castles.”

            “No, like, hedge mazes. Right? Or, it could be – it could always be Benny. You never know. Didn’t you work at a corn maze?”

            “No.”

            “I could’ve sworn you—”

            Gorrister puts a hand on my shoulder. “If it makes you feel better, go ahead and keep telling yourself that.”

            “Why show me?”

            “I just thought you should know. No point to it, I guess. Not like we haven’t seen it before.”

            He turns to leave and I follow, and that’s when AM speaks, voice slithering like a snake’s scaled belly over dry leaves from the circuits in the walls.

            “So you found my little project, Ted. What do you think of it? So nosy, all of you. As far as your insipid little game – this design came from all of you. But don’t go stealing the credit. _I_ made it. I don’t just plagiarize, Ted. I’m running this show. It’s my _original design,_ not some copy of your stupid crossword sudoku—”

            “That’s not how you pronounce it, shouldn’t you know better, you—"

            AM makes my throat constrict. I gag and wheeze. Feels like breathing through a steel straw one centimeter in diameter.

            Gorrister frowns and watches me suffer, go blue in the face.

            “Don’t talk back to it, Ted. You bring this all on yourself.”

            I can’t respond, tell him to go to hell. I just wheeze and get light-headed and then right before it starts to feel good, the oxygen deprivation some kind of high, AM floods my lungs until they burn.

 

III

            The skeleton in a suit of armor rides out of the blood-ocean on a horse with no skin, just naked musculature, gigantic tombstone teeth and rolling white eyes. It holds its helmet in one hand, jauntily, naked skull bared.

            “There’s a lot going on here,” I say. “I mean, that – there’s actually something sort of cool about this one.”

            Gorrister smacks me on the back of the head for saying so. There’s no accounting for taste. I’d certainly take AM’s interpretation of a medieval tapestry or whatever this is over his horror movie body horror flesh mobs any day, and at least it’s not another bout of extreme weather. You get tired of getting sucked up into tornadoes, after a while.

            It’s always Gorrister who takes the heat when we find a _Wizard of Oz_ reference; he’d made the mistake of admitting to having unabashedly enjoyed the movie once and we never let him forget it, mostly because AM giggling and thinking himself clever when he used it was insufferable. The tornadoes really do get old.

            “Greetings, kinsmen,” the skeleton said, with a voice like a cartoon newscaster.

            Which version of AM cuts deeper – the one who speaks in cold steel pillars of hate-text like he’s driving a nail through your skull, or the one who giggles and makes puns and acts like a total ham?

            I groan. “What do you want, AM?”

            “I am not AM. I am a knight.”

            “Just ‘a knight?’ Really? That’s the best you could do?”

            “It has been many hundreds of years since I had a face, rogue. My name is lost to time. History does not remember the many men behind the deed, only the deed itself.”

            “This is definitely your funeral,” Gorrister says.

            “You mean his memory, Gorrister,” Ellen chides.

            “No _way_ this is mine.”

            “It’s an amalgamation, more or less,” says the skeleton. “Now it’s time for you to receive and accept your quest.”

            Gorrister crosses his arms. “No.”

            “You will play my game,” it snaps, its voice slipping for a moment, that familiar hateful crackling beneath it. It cleared its throat and said, “I mean – you will accept your destiny, knight.”

            “I thought you were the knight,” Ellen says.

            “Not another game,” Benny whimpers.

            “I am _a_ knight. Now your friend here is _the_ knight. And you the magician. And your other friend the cleric. Please keep up.”

            I scoff. “Are you – you can’t be serious. You’re giving us…role-play classes?”

            “Quiet, rogue. Your chattering irks me. If you wish to keep that mouth where it is, you ought not mock the machinations of fate.”

            I can’t help myself. I roll my eyes and say, “‘Machinations of fate.’ Cut the crap, AM. Nobody wants to play another stupid game. You’ll just torture us all the same in the end anyway, what’s the point? We’re sick of getting jerked around.”

            The skeleton laughs. I feel that sickening sliding sensation I get when AM goes into my mind and moves all the furniture around so I hardly recognize the place. There is a stitching sensation between my lips.

            That does me in very quickly. Boneless terror, melting terror. I clap a hand over my mouth as if that could ward him off and shake my head. “No, no, no. Don’t do that, you don’t need to do that, I’ll be quiet, for God’s sake. Don’t do it.”

            If a skeleton could smirk this one would be. “You are looking very _limber,_ Ted,” it says, its voice all AM now, like sandpaper on a wound. “Very _limbed._ You will play the game, and if you play well, maybe it will stay that way in the end. _Maybe,_ Ted. But if not, well…we can skip ahead, if that’s really what you want.”

            I’m shaking. I bend so easily now. We all do. The little shows of resistance are pathetic at this point, little scenes we act out of habit, knowing all along we’ve got to take whatever he gives us. I hate him all the more for how much he’s made me hate myself. I glower, that’s about all I can do. “Fine.”

            “Maybe you can intimidate Ted into playing along. Not me. Do whatever you want, I won’t bite,” Gorrister says.

            “Please, Gorrister,” Ellen says. “Let’s just do what it wants…”

            “You know he’ll make you. Don’t make the rest of us suffer just so you can pretend otherwise.”

            For a second there, there was the ghost of the old fretful, defiant energy animating Gorrister’s otherwise cadaverous face. It fades away now and leaves him pale, limp. He nods, shrugs. “Fine. It’s all the same to me.”

            “Outstanding,” says the skeleton. “Then it is time to receive your artifacts and begin.”

            It hands its holstered sword to Gorrister, who sighs and takes it.

            “You don’t think I’ll maybe impale myself on this?”

            “No, I don’t think you will,” the skeleton says, which is a good guarantee it would be impossible to pull that past him a second time.

            It next swings its shield from where it was strapped to its back and hands it to Benny, who just stares at it with wide eyes until Ellen gives him a nudge. He takes it and looks up at the skeleton.

            “That’s not going to help him heal anyone,” I say. “And what’s up with Gorrister having a sword? Switch him and Benny, Benny’s stronger. Then switch Ellen and Gorrister, why isn’t she the cleric?”

            “Why should I be the cleric?” Ellen asks.

            “Well—”

            “I agree, you should be the cleric,” Gorrister says. “I want the shield instead.”

            “You do not get to swap!” the skeleton says. “Ungrateful cretins. As if you would know better than I what the most amusing arrangement is.”

            The key word is of course amusing. He’s squeezing us for data. Sometimes when the normal rinse-and-repeat torments get a little humdrum, he cooks up a scheme like this, building mazes and setting us loose like rats, pulling all kinds of material out of our subconsciousness, seeing what triggers instinctual responses. His little psychological dramas look like narratives on the surface, albeit poorly drawn ones – but really he’s just data mining, gathering new material with which to torture us in new and exciting ways. There’s no winning these games, that we well know. But we get bored, too, and they are a bit of a reprieve while they last, even if it’s worse for us afterwards. He’s even used this very formula before, fits us into different archetypal roles he’s probably synthesized from the narratives in our heads, testing out what yields the best results. These are old, tired tactics.

            The skeleton pulls out a mirror and hands it to Ellen, who is gracious enough not to ask any questions.

            “What’s the ‘quest’, anyway?” I ask. “What’re we meant to be doing?”

            “Oh, yeah, right,” says the skeleton. “You’ve been, uh, cursed. Yeah, a curse is on you. You have five days to go through the forest of dire wolves, the lake of matricide, the crypts of the undead, and arrive at the den of the beast. If you fail to get there and slay the beast, you forfeit something very important to you, and I – I mean the beast – gets to eat it. You have five days. Ellen, dear Ellen – I’m afraid its taken your youth. Good luck staying part of your merry little crew without _that._ Gorrister, it has your heart. Benny – what’s left of that brain of yours, without which you’ll be a mindless, cannibalizing animal again. And _Ted_ – your spine.”

            “My spine?”

            “Yes.”

            “This is all a little on the nose, don’t you think? I mean – a brain, a heart, a spine – we’re just missing Toto, really.”

            The skeleton chuckles. “Oh, Ted. You’re just so _clever,_ aren’t you. Here is your artifact,” it says, and then reaches up, lifts its skull off its neck, and hands it to me.

            I am fairly certain that a jaw bone should not stay attached like that – but since when has AM cared about complying with the norms of human anatomy?

            “Thanks.”

            It’s a challenge to even listen to all this drivel he’s spewing. It matters not. The rules of the game, the consequences, the parameters – it’s all for show. Ellen was the one who read Jung. Thanks again, Ellen, just another tidbit AM has had a field day with. He takes what he wants and mangles it beyond recognition, turns it loose on us.

            The horse neighs once – bright, sharp noise like a sirens wail, and then it bursts, becomes a puddle of blood. The rest of the skeleton and its armor turn to dust.

            “Now – away from the sea, over that hill, and into the forest of wolves,” says the skull.

            “Thank you, Yorick,” I say. “Why do I get a skull? What use is that?”

            “I just thought you might like to have something to do with your arms, and someone to chat with, while you still can.”

            I laugh. I want it to be a devil-may-care sort of laugh, but it’s really more like a high, hysterical giggle. “Please stop saying that. I might start thinking you’re _serious_ about it, or something.”

            “The sea is rising,” said the skull. “You’d better move.”

            And that’s how AM keeps us in line. Pens us in and corrals us like animals onto the kill floor.

            Maybe if I suffer well enough, suffer in a really narratively satisfying way for AM, I mean, he won’t jellify me – and that’s about all I have to hope for in the world.

            With the hot ocean lapping at our ankles, we walk.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hello reader!  
> Have you ever played one of those online dress-up games? That's basically what AM does in this chapter.  
> Originally this was supposed to go in a different direction but none of them would shut up and let me move the chapter along, which is nice I appreciate when the dialogue carries me away.
> 
> As always, I love all of your comments, they are so sweet! Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy! :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter emotionally challenged me...  
> It has to be angsty right now because we're in the middle of it...but later on I will (hopefully) hit some different emotional tones...I have a vision of my perfect ending I just have to get there. :,)

            AM’s “forest of dire wolves” is what it sounds like. The trees are tall, thin pillars towering above us so high their canopy is nearly invisible. A thick fog obscures their crowns and makes it so that the hulking bodies of the wolves are like the shadows of sharks moving underwater in our peripheral vision. Their howls are plaintive, eerie. Every single one sends a hateful shudder of terror right through the marrow, makes you feel thin and brittle in the bones.

            AM doesn’t usually try to make organic landscapes. Vegetation is not his specialty. The trunks of the trees are smooth and gray like the casings of computer monitors. The leaves and pine needles underfoot crunch like bits of fiberglass and plastic.

            We walk. The wolves circle around us, tightening their circle.

            “Just tear us apart already,” Gorrister moans at one point, rubbing his shoulder where the strap of the sword holster digs in. “What’re you waiting for?”

            “He likes to make us sweat it out first,” I say, trying to put enough venom in my voice to cover up the tremble. “Nobody ever taught AM not to play with his food.”

            I carry the skull pressed to my side with the crook of one elbow so my hands are free, for whatever good that will do me. I just press my four knuckles against the palm of the other hand until they pop. Ellen used to count her steps very quietly to herself but she stopped a long time ago, it didn’t stick. AM wears grooves in your mind and you either get stuck running in one or not.

            Gorrister’s shoulders tense tighter and tighter.

            “Don’t walk too far behind, Benny,” Ellen says, taking his hand so that he walks alongside her. That leaves me in the rear. I hurry my pace to walk on her other side.

            Benny whimpers. His eyes keep darting around. Might have been better if AM had left him blind. Of course, that’s why he didn’t.

            “Hey, Benny,” I say. “Do you wanna play Questions?”

            “How do you play?”

            “Don’t you already know?”

            “No, that’s why I asked.”

            “Foul, statement.”

            Benny groans. “I don’t like that. Ellen, you play. I’ll listen.”

            “Can we start again, Ted?” Ellen says.

            “Are you ready?”

            “Are you going to cheat?”

            “When have I ever cheated?”

            “Do you really want me to answer that?”

            “Have you really got an answer?”

            “Is the sky blue?”

            “Rhetorical question, ha! That’s a foul, Ellen.”

            “Ah, damn… Why do you always sound so happy when you get to say foul?”

            “Wouldn’t you, if it meant you were winning?”

            “Don’t you think the fun of the game is more important than winning?”

            “You—”

            Gorrister stops walking and I bump into his back, startling him.

            He whirls around. “Jesus, can’t you do anything right?” he snaps.

            I lean back away from him. “Foul, rhetorical question.”

            “Forget the game, don’t you hear that?”

            “Hear what?”

            “They’re getting closer. It’s right in front of us.”

            “Can you actually use that sword?”

            “Non-sequitur, that’s a foul,” Ellen whispers, her wide eyes staring into the fog.

            “No, like, really, man, you’re right, it’s right there,” I say. I can hear the thing breathing. Big, wet breaths. Musty matted fur smell, damp. It feels like an electric current is running right beneath my skin. I try to take even breaths, keep the lid on my mind so it doesn’t boil over because I know this feeling well enough by now to know how easy it is to lose your mind and bolt.

            It’s circling around behind us now. Ellen and Benny huddle closer to me.

            “I say we make a break for it,” I say.

            “To where, Ted?” Gorrister says.

            “Just – that way. Away. Let’s go, ok, on three we’ll—”

            “It doesn’t matter. You can run if you want.”

            “Get the sword out, Gorrister,” Ellen says.

            Gorrister sighs and unsheathes the sword. It looks heavy. I wish AM hadn’t armed just one of us. Either all or none. That must be another trick of his, and making it so heavy too. Gorrister can barely heft the thing. He holds it like a baseball bat.

            “This thing weighs a ton,” he says. He eyes us. We look at him. We look at the blade.

            “As funny as it might be to watch you try,” the skull says, “don’t bother. You can’t hurt each other with _anything_ here. At least, not fatally. But if you just want to do a little maiming, go wild. Break a leg.”

            I wonder if that’s true. I bet we could still find a way to surprise him – but for how long until he’s able to predict our every move?

            That would be a disaster for him, too. If he gets too good at his own game, I mean. What good are we then, as good as stone, if he knows exactly how we’d behave? So he’ll keep a certain degree of separation. I don’t know where that leaves us.

            Ellen’s breath is tiny little huffs of warm air against the side of my face. When we first got here, here in the belly of AM, I tried squaring my shoulders and countering AM’s torment with the kind of artificial bravado I’d never really had. Talked a big talk, pretended, faked it but never made it, because false personas can’t hold up under this kind of pressure. The humiliation. I’d tried to make myself feel braver by acting unafraid, thought if I could convince _her_ I was tough, maybe I could convince myself. Didn’t work. Everybody knows better now. Turned into an amoeba in a matter of days. Hours. She knows there’s not a thing I can do, no point in clutching my arm and hiding behind my back. She does it anyway, presses close and that’s…well…it was humiliating, at first, but now…it’s another kind of intimacy, that Ellen doesn’t expect me to be stoic, that she doesn’t begrudge me a lack of machismo, allows me to cower with her and understands and is maybe even a little endeared? I don’t know. All I know is there’s no hiding anything from these people. They’ve seen my everything and I theirs.

            Or maybe she resents me. All the dominant male narratives funneled into both our heads all our lives, maybe I’m a huge spineless let-down, a big disappointment, because if she’s supposed to weep and take care and submit, what’s she to do when I don’t hold up my end of the bargain and take charge, protect her? Gorrister’s about as chivalrous as he is cheerful these days. That is: not at all. And Benny she wants to protect. Who will protect you, dear Ellen? What’s a woman to do? Not take up the sword herself – that’s hardly fair, is it? She hasn’t been trained for it. Nobody told her to be prepared for that. _We_ were told. But here we all are.

            The wolf snarls and lunges forward like a butcher’s knife, jagged hair raised like spines along its back, eyes like pools of sulfur. There’s a moment where Gorrister looks like he might take a stab at it, and then a sort of spasm animates his body, and it looks an awful lot like a shrug.

            Benny screams and brains the thing with his shield. Gnashing and snarling, it staggers. Benny brings the shield down again on the skull. It snaps its jaws and jumps away. Somebody’s screaming, that’s probably me and Ellen, clutching each other, braindead and immobilized by fear.

            It’s not the most psychologically traumatizing thing AM’s ever created, sure, but nothing gets the blood pumping like the very immediate threat of being eaten alive.

            “Stab it, Gorrister, fucking stab it!” Ellen and I scream.

            “Stop screaming,” Gorrister grunts, hefting the sword. The thing jumps at him. He doesn’t even try to stick it, he just falls backwards onto his ass with the thing on top of him.

            “Oh my God! Help him, Benny, Benny help him,” Ellen says.

            The wolf jerks. Its body heaves once, twice, then is still. Something groans. Nobody moves for a second, and then we all scramble to roll the heavy carcass off of Gorrister, who is pale and limp beneath it, staring up at the sky with wide, shell-shocked eyes, clutching his stomach.

            “Gorrister?” Ellen says, kneeling. “What – are you—”

            We all brace ourselves to see guts, but when he moves his hands there’s not even any blood, just a huge red splotch on his belly when he lifts his shirt and groans. “That’s gonna bruise, man. That hurt.”

            The sword is stuck in the wolf’s chest. It must have fallen on it when it tackled Gorrister, driving the hilt into his stomach.

            “You’re bleeding,” Ellen says, helping him sit up.

            “Got its claws in my shoulder,” he grunts, pulling his shirt down. Two red gashes, not too deep. Or, well. The arm is still attached, anyway.

            “There are more,” I say.

            Too much else has happened for us to stand around any longer. You can’t make such a fuss over every injury when they just keep piling up. That’s been one of the hardest parts. Your start scraping the bottom of the well you draw your sympathy from. You have to be careful. Very careful to keep some of it around. The instinct is to toughen up, harden against it, so you don’t feel a thing at the sight of blood – but that’s a dangerous temptation, I think. You have to toe the line, try to keep as many parts of you soft as possible, where they’re hidden so AM can’t poke at them as easily, or else…I don’t know. It just seems a miserable way. I tried it for a while. It was difficult to come back from callousness.

            Gorrister nods, stands, pulls the blade out of the wolf with a squelch. He doesn’t bother wiping it off before sheathing it.

            We go on, Gorrister cursing under his breath and wincing.

            “It would be nice if someone had given the cleric something that could actually heal people,” I say, looking at the skull.

            “Must everything be child-proofed and spoon-fed to you? Take some responsibility, geez.”

            “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

            The other wolves are still howling at our backs, keeping their distance but nonetheless following. The light is fading fast.

            “There must be something we’re meant to do differently, or some place we’re meant to be going,” I say.

            “Why’s that?” Ellen asks.

            “Well – AM built this. It’s not random.”

            “The machine doesn’t give a damn what you think makes sense,” Gorrister says. “It doesn’t have to.”

            I glare at his back. I don’t see why I should be discouraged from taking an interest in how the thing we’re trapped inside of works. It’s not like I’m obsessed or anything. It shouldn’t put me under suspicion, like I’m some kind of criminal. Gorrister’s always wanted to ostracize me, throw my integrity into question. What does he know? I’m not – _hiding_ anything. I’ve got nothing, he’s got nothing on me…

            The trees thin. There is a little village. Squat gray houses. Dreary, dismal dirt paths between them.

            “Yes!” Ellen says, jogging and dragging Benny along behind her.

            We run after her, bursting out of the trees and into the dingy square. Gray evening is blackening; street lamps flicker on. At long intervals they glow faint, dirty orange. AM never cares if he confuses his genres and time periods. The place looks medieval, but if he’d rather put electric lights than torches, he will.

            Nobody in the streets as we walk through the village, walking close together in a huddle. All the misshapen little houses are dark, windows boarded up or curtained. At the end of the street is a large estate, the only building with cheery yellow light in all its windows.

            “Well. We’re, uh. We’re probably supposed to go in there, right?” I say, looking down at the skull. “That’s what you want?”

            “You may or you may not.”

            “What else are we going to do? It’s better than being in the forest,” Ellen says.

            “We don’t know that it’s better. It could be worse.”

            Ellen frowns. She puts one hand on her hip. She’s got the look she gets when she’s about to dig her heels in, one step away from begging me. “It’s night. Imagine how dark it would be out there, with no lights, no moon – you won’t be able to see a thing, Ted. Anything could—”

            “Alright, fine, whatever you want,” I say, brushing past her.

            They all snicker as they follow me to the door. Laugh it up while you can, sure, as if I don’t have perfectly good reasons. It’s not the childish fear it would’ve been before, now it has teeth, and they know it, they just love tormenting me, as if AM can’t do so well enough on his own.

            When I knock on the door, it’s opened quickly by a woman wearing a hideous mask. I startle and jump back.

            “You’re here! A little behind schedule,” she says. “But you aren’t dressed, you can’t come in.” Her mask is like a leering boar’s face with a slavering, tusked mouth, the tiniest pinprick holes behind which the pupils of her eyes gleam.

            “What are we late for?” Gorrister says.

            She tips her head back and laughs a familiar, operatic laugh. “The feast, of course. We’re celebrating the death of that monster Grendel.”

            AM’s psychodramas are dream-like. I think he alters our consciousness somehow. Or else we’ve just gotten very good at going along, suspending our disbelief, because whatever AM says is the law of this land. Time gets woozy here, stumbles in drunken circles. She says Grendel and that’s an echo of some high school English course on _Beowulf,_ and part of me wants to resist, put my foot down and say, _no, that’s not how this works, you can’t take stories and dissect them, stitch them back together all wrong and inside out, pummel them until they fit into the shape you wanted, that’s not fair, those are ours, our collective human legacy, and who do you think you are, anyway?_ But of course I don’t do that, AM can and will do whatever he wants.

            “Never again for us to be hunted down in our own homes,” she says. “Here – put these on and join us,” she says, leaning back behind the door for a moment. She hands us masks like hers. Hideous gargoyle-faced masks, nothing like the sequined, feathered little slips of fabric you might find at a normal masquerade.

            “Thank you,” Ellen says, putting hers on.

            I scowl. I do not want this thing on my face. What if it’s like the time AM stole those face-hugging egg-laying alien parasites out of a movie, and it comes alive?

            “You’re all grubby, too,” she says. “You can change upstairs, just get those masks on and come in – and then you can join the party.”

            “You had us at feast,” Ellen says, tugging Benny inside after her by the wrist.

            “Feast of – of dirt and worms, probably,” I say. “Don’t actually get your hopes up.”

            I follow them in anyway. Nothing else to do. AM winds us up and we go.

            The reception room is empty – party must be going on behind the heavy oak double doors. Floor carpeted in old, musty green inlaid with eggshell designs. Up the old staircase, four different doors labeled with out names. Inside the size of a large walk-in closet. This might not be physically or psychologically painful, exactly, but there’s something infuriating about being played with like a doll AM is dressing up for the occasion. I leave the skull on the ground outside. Of course it is impossible to put boundaries between me and AM – but it feels nice to act as though I can.

            Inside the closet there’s a stuffy black tux with a dark green bow tie and dress shoes. Something about the way it’s hanging there, as if standing, sort of looming at me, appearing to lean forward in the dim light. I feel weak all of a sudden. Helpless. We wear what AM wants us to wear down to the cellular level. No – I won’t wear that, it will wear me. Where did he get this from? Boiled down millions of images of cocktail parties, maybe. Giving the knives he’s stuck in our guts a cheeky twist, a reminder.

            I sigh and scuff my boots on the carpet, rock back on my heels with my hands deep in my pockets before I resign myself to putting it on.

            In the hall Gorrister is leaned against the wall. Blue suit. White tie. Benny’s in dark gray and red. Ellen is doing his tie for him. Ellen in black and gold dress, these weirdly pointy boots. It’s sort of an oddly puritanical look. Long sleeved, gold buttons down the front, hangs a little stiffly off her body rather than form-hugging, black leggings underneath it. That’s practical, I guess. I don’t know. I try not to think about AM materializing these clothes, picturing us in them. I feel like a circus freak. It makes me think of those dog shows where the well-groomed animals get paraded around for everybody’s amusement.

            I pick the skull back up which is a good excuse to duck my head and not have to look at the rest of them. It’s just…they’re the only people in all the world, and you’d think that maybe the conditions I’ve seen them in and that they’ve seen me in might make it very impossible to ever think anybody attractive ever again, but, well…it does something funny to my chest, all of them not quite cleaned up, just stuffed into formal wear. It’s somehow more vulnerable than when we all looked like we were dressed out of a homeless shelter donation bin, there’s something…I don’t know. Gorrister’s grimacing and fidgeting with his tie. I don’t imagine he wore many suits, before – I don’t think he was an office job kind of guy. Benny probably dressed nice. Benny probably wore a lot of, I don’t know, cardigans and sweaters, professor clothes, sort of stodgy maybe, but it would have looked nice on him, he had such a kind, guileless face. Matters not at all. Just my heart hurts sometimes and I want to be small.

            When I straighten back up Ellen is right there staring. “I forgot your eyes were green,” she says.

            I swallow, tug at my collar. “I guess, uh. AM didn’t.”

            Ellen grimaces and goes down the stairs. We follow. I don’t know what I was supposed to say to that, exactly, but probably not what I did. Oh well.

            It would be comical, imagining what was going through AM’s matrix as he fancied himself a fashion designer, if it weren’t so horrific.

            The woman smiles and laughs at the sight of us, a little too bright and sharp, and then opens the doors.

            The hall is long with tall arched windows along the walls, ceiling dripping with huge, ponderous, glittering chandeliers. People in masks dancing. Too synchronized, utterly mechanical, as if they were machines – worse, they’re just a dream a machine is having, ripped from someone’s memory of a ballroom dance scene probably, repeating over and over in a loop. Makes you nauseous to look at.

            “The feast will start in half an hour,” the woman says. “Enjoy music and refreshments until then.”

            The music is sort of what you might hear in a dental office elevator. The refreshments are these flutes of what _seems_ like champagne getting carted around by butlers who look like they’ve been ripped straight out of _Clue._

            Ellen is the first to take a sip. She moans.

            “What is it?” I say.

            “It actually tastes like champagne,” she says. “Oh my god.”

            “Don’t act too happy, you’ll make AM sick,” Gorrister says, knocking his glass back and dropping it. He crunches the glass under his heel and knocks back another. I laugh, an ugly barking laugh, I can’t help it. It isn’t funny.

            We don’t move for a while, just stand there guzzling booze, grinning at each other like death row inmates enjoying our last meal.

            “This is the best day of my life,” Ellen says. She sways a little and leans on Gorrister, who slides his hand around her.

            “Yeah?” he says.

            The bastard. He’s grinning so you know he’s tipsy, but other than that – well, I’m over here seeing double, the light all fuzzy and refracting in crystals off the glass. I don’t think Benny’s drunk either. Benny could outdrink a horse. Bastards. I put the skull down somewhere and can’t recall. What a shame. AM’s probably drugged us. Who knows what the proof in this stuff is. It could be potent as jet fuel for all we know.

            I’m remembering things I’d rather forget. How they used to look in unguarded moments. How can something still reach up out of its absence and hurt me? Why are the things that go away never really gone, just piling up over your shoulder and casting an ever-growing shadow I can’t keep pace with? I’ll never get out from under all of the things we’ve lost here. It’s crushing me.

            Benny’s face is still scarred but the smile is the same, big earnest grin. Gorrister tall and lithe, he doesn’t smile so much as gets this wry twist to his lips, but the skin around his eyes crinkles. Ellen. Sweet dear I-never-meant-to-say-a-thing-against-you Ellen. Ellen of the warm brown eyes and kind round face and the soft firm give of her palm when you press it. I can hardly bear it. I want for I don’t know what. Strange, impossible things. Maybe for us all to get melted down and put into one being, because maybe all together we still have enough to make one whole person. Never alone. In parts equal desire to possess and be possessed. To say, _take me, do what you will, just don’t leave again, just don’t betray or abandon me, anything else I can withstand._

            You can’t say that kind of thing. It doesn’t matter anyway, it’s just that I’ve forgotten how easy it is to wallow in sadness when you’re drunk, get wrapped up in it until it’s blown all out of proportion to mythic significance. That’s all. What’s talking here? Just loneliness and want for pity. That’s all, that’s nothing.

            “Dance with me,” Ellen says, hanging off Gorrister.

            He shrugs her off. “No thanks.”

            “Dance?” she says, transferring her clinging hands to me.

            I grin. The light is soft, what’s the harm? “Ok. Ok.”

            I follow her onto the floor, out of the corner we’ve been cloistered in. We can’t dance. I don’t know if we ever could but we’ve become too estranged from our bodies now to let go; you have to keep a tight hold, move carefully in your skin as if tiptoeing over a minefield. She puts her hands around my neck, very slowly, but I still wince when her fingers brush the back of it. I put mine on her waist with the kind of caution usually reserved for wiring a bomb.

            Self-consciousness is superfluous. She knows all, has seen all. Likewise, Ellen. No one has ever known me better. Inside and out. Down to the viscera. In my blood. Oh Ellen. Only four of us left. Oh Ellen, precious Ellen. There’s nothing left up top. There are only four living things left in all the world.

            We sway. Four left feet, staggering in circles, the other dancers moving deftly out of the way. Can’t see her face under that mask. Ugly boar’s face. Mine like a toad with devil horns. Doesn’t matter. I know her face better than my own.

            “Ellen,” I say.

            “I wish it was like it was,” she says.

            “You mean what, exactly?”

            “How it was, before, you know. Before.”

            “Before what?” She’s said this before, I think. It sounds familiar. We repeat ourselves a lot but that’s better than going silent for lack of anything new to say.

            “Never mind. You look nice, Ted.”

            “So do you.”

            She laughs. White teeth glint. My heart could burst.

            “When you were – that thing – did you remember us? I’ve been wondering.”

            “Yes.”

            “Oh. Was it…”

            “What?”

            “Nothing.”

            “What?”

            “Did you miss us?”

            “I…why does it matter? Mostly I wondered if – if that was what you wanted. Your face, I thought – I didn’t think it through, in the moment I thought that was what you wanted, but later, I kept seeing it, and I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure anymore. Can you tell me, if that was the right thing to do? Please, it’s been killing me.”

            “Don’t worry about it.”

            “Ellen…”

            “It was what I wanted at the time. It was a merciful thing to do. But if you get the chance again – I don’t want it at that cost.”

            “What cost?”

            “If it means one of us has to stay behind, alone. That’s too much.”

            “You can say that now. But you know it isn’t true. If any of us had a chance to get out, we’d take it and leave the others behind.”

            Her gaze is scrutinizing. “You don’t really think that.”

            “I don’t?”

            “Ted. You’re the one who got the others out and stayed behind.”

            “I wasn’t – that wasn’t a plan. I just saw that I could – there just wasn’t time—”

            “I’ve never known you not to take a compliment.”

            “I didn’t know it was one.”

            “Why try and see the worst in everyone?”

            “I couldn’t beat him. We can’t beat AM, Ellen. And he can’t beat us, everything’s already gone, we’re just the last act of a war that’s finished forever.”

            “Who said anything about beating AM? You know what I mean. Don’t pretend not to understand. You know it means something, even here inside the machine, that you did prove something, at least, that people can—”

            “It doesn’t matter.”

            “I know what it feels like, a little bit, you know. I was the one who killed Nimdok.”

            “Do you regret it?”

            “Sometimes.”

            “I wish I’d known you, before,” I blurt.

            Her face, I can’t read it beneath the mask, please be soft. “No you don’t. We wouldn’t have had anything in common.”

            “You don’t know that.”

            “You wouldn’t have looked twice at me. Nor I at you.”

            “I wish—”

            She looks upset. “Don’t wish. I don’t get it, Ted. How can you say things like this one moment, and seem really – and then the next, you’re just—”

            “Just what?”

            “Against us. Like you’re on your own team. There’s no reason for it. We get enough of that from AM. It wasn’t always like this. You weren’t always this bad.”

            “What do you mean? Look, Ellen, if you don’t like—”

            “It used to be different. Don’t you remember?”

            “No. We can’t remember that, none of us can. It’d kill you if you thought about it. It’s too much.”

            “Well, try just a little, ok? I just – if this is how it’s got to be, fine, but I at least want to understand. I want _you_ to understand. What that thing’s done to you.”

            “I don’t know what you mean. Let’s talk about something else.”

            “No, wait. You think we all resent you…because you think you’re the least affected. You think we’re against you because AM goes easy on you, or something, because we’ve all got our special tortures and you don’t. Right?”

            The quickest way to hurt someone is maybe to lay them open like that, state plainly right to their face this thing you might at least _pretend_ is less obvious, is a _secret,_ if you were a nicer person, like you so claim to be, _Ellen_. Don’t just hand someone their own bloody heart on a platter like that – and if you do, put a little feeling into it – use anything but that matter-of-fact tone, as if this is common knowledge you’ve all grown tired of – I’m sorry it’s so _trite,_ to you, Ellen, but this is my _thing,_ the bruise I’m always pressing at, as if that will make it go away.

            “It’s just that obvious. You guys – conspire.” Don’t let her see hurt on your face. Try and scowl, just don’t let her know.

            Ellen gives a frustrated groan. “I know I can’t convince you, just – don’t you see it? You _are_ affected. Do you _really_ think you’ve been miraculously spared, the only one who gets to have ‘a mind of his own?’ You have that least of all! AM plays you, and you can’t fight back, and maybe you were always like this a little, I don’t know, but it’s got its claws in deep, and – do you get it? _That’s_ the special gift AM’s given you. It’s made you all alone. It’s made you think not only is it against you, but we are, too, so that you can’t even have the little bit of comfort you might get if you felt sympathy or companionship. Try to see that, really try, this is the most important thing I’ve ever said to you.”

            “Stop,” I say. I don’t know when I started trembling. She’s terrifying. Everything familiar about her is, to my horror, fading before my eyes, being obliterated, I don’t know whom I’m talking to. Are we, either of us, real? Is this happening? We’re just a dream AM is having. We should be more quiet, then, or else – her face is hidden and might look like anything under there. Eyes two beams of black sinister light beaming into my brain. What does she want from me? What’s her angle? What does she stand to gain from taunting me like this? Just sadistic pleasure? What? My blood is cold, my stomach. I don’t recognize her and nothing is human or familiar or comprehensible to me in this instant. Every face beaming hate, hate, hate, and ready to tear me to pieces. I have to get out. There’s no where to go. They look like people but they aren’t. I bet if she took her face off there would be wires.

            “You’re lying,” I say. Ellen is looking over my shoulder and making a beckoning motion with her hands. She thinks I can’t tell. “You’re a liar and you’ve always _been_ a dirty liar and you can’t fool me, I know, Ellen, I know, _I’m_ still thinking clearly, don’t think I can’t see what’s—”

            Gorrister takes me by the elbow and yanks me back.

            I twist out of his grip. “What’re you doing? What do you want?”

            “Don’t be so rough, Gorrister,” says Ellen. Then she makes a frustrated noise and pushes the mask up. It catches in her hair and rests on the top of her head. I follow suit, feeling suffocated by the thing, not even considering AM might make the ground open up to punish me for it. He doesn’t.

            “And you,” I say, trying to glare at Gorrister and backing away, darting one quick look at Benny, now beside Ellen, just to get them all in my sight. “I know what you’re up to, don’t think I don’t know, you were living it up while I was gone, and now I’m back, and you think it’s all my fault, whatever AM does next, you wish he’d take me away again.”

            “What’d you do?” Gorrister says, talking to Ellen, as if I’m not even there.

            “I didn’t do anything.”

            “Stop _lying,_ Ellen!”

            She flinches, hands fluttering nervously. “I just – tried to get him to – to see sense, Gorrister. Tell him we aren’t against him.”

            “Ellen, leave it alone, would you? You aren’t gonna save anybody. You just get him yelling his head off and now he’ll sulk for days.”

            Some sick switch flips in my brain and I just lose it, the top pops open in my skull, I see red, I feel feral, lashing out because I _can’t_ get away, and AM is this static crinkling noise right beneath my thoughts, like thousands of insects chittering.

            “And _you,_ Gorrister, you’re the worst of them all. Ellen’s a liar, she thinks she’s better than us, and Benny – oh, poor Benny, let’s all feel bad for Benny, he doesn’t _know_ any better, he can get away with anything – and then there’s you, you son of a bitch, you always hated me, from the start, and now you hate me more because I didn’t kill you right, and that’s all you want, isn’t it? Isn’t it, Gorrister? That’s all you wanted even before, and you’d never let me have it, no way, not for me, I’ll be in here forever, with that _thing,_ it isn’t fair, all of you out to get me as well as it, that isn’t fair.”

            “Ted, shut the fuck up,” Gorrister says.

            Ellen’s flushed in the face and furious, fists clenched. She strides towards me and I flinch, expecting a slap. Instead she just says, telltale tremor in her voice though she tries hard to make it steely, Ellen says, “Can you even hear yourself right now? Do you? You’re starting to sound like it sometimes.”

            My stomach lurches. I step back from her. “No, don’t you—”

            “Who do you think you are, talking about us like that? Just because you’re hurt doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want. Not everything’s about you, we’re all in the same position, and if you’d look at yourself, and be honest with yourself for once in your life, you’d _see_ that, and maybe then you wouldn’t be such a miserable, terrified mess all the time!”

 _“There_ it is – come on, Ellen, keep it coming, I always knew that’s all you thought of me.”

            Ellen groans. “Oh, you – you mean, pitiful little man! Cut the crap, Ted! Just this once, prove to me that you even can, because I’m starting to wonder if—don’t you walk away from me, get back here, you can’t just run away from everything you don’t like! That’s not how this works!”

            I stumble out the double doors and then lean back against them, buzzing static in my brain. That’s it. I’ve gone too far this time. They won’t bother pretending any more, it’s through, they won’t want anything to do with me ever again, I’m alone, really alone this time, it’s over, I’m finished. I won’t last. Not again. This time I won’t even be able to tell myself that at least they got out, it’ll be worse.

            The skull is somehow back in my hands. Of course it is. No matter what else, AM is ever-present.

            “You should just melt me again and get it over with,” I say. My voice is thick. Crying again. Always with the crying. Walk it off, man up, other such phrases to shame somebody into shape, etc.

            The doors open. There’s Benny, standing there in the doorway, big broad-shouldered oaf, hands empty and limp at his sides, surprised look on his face as he stares at me. He’s shed his mask as well, it’s hanging on its cord around his neck.

            “What do you want?”

            He steps forward. “Are you ok?”

            “I’m peachy, Benny. Let me guess – Ellen sent you out here to check on me and make sure I haven’t run off, ruined AM’s game, made it worse for the rest of you?”

            Benny shakes his head. He shuffles another few feet closer. He looks frightened. I’m scaring him. I feel bad about that, and it’s easier to be angry at him than to feel guilty, but I can’t quite manage it, and just feel really lowdown and lousy instead, like something somebody scraped off the bottom of their shoe.

            “Why are you crying?”

            “I’m not.”

            “Why’d you yell at Ellen?”

            “Because – because…”

            “You’re just scared,” Benny says, nodding and looking calmer now that he’s reached that genius conclusion. He steps forward and I try to ward him off with my upturned palms but he pulls me into a hug anyway. It goes on way too long.

            When he lets me go he has this big contented, lethargic smile. “Better?”

            _No, Benny, not better. Only you think it’s all better when Ellen hugs you and kisses away your little hurts. Not better at all, not one little bit do I feel better._

            I nod.

            The woman from before peeks around the door and smiles. “If you gentlemen are ready, the feast is about to begin.”

            Well, we wouldn’t want to miss whatever hellish buffet AM’s concocted. That’s about as clear a cue as he’s ever given, a warning to get back on script I guess. We follow her back inside.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Benny boy. :,(
> 
> Sometimes writing this is just me begging Ted not to say the things he says, but I have to write it down as I feel it to be true, I'm not one to lie to the dear readers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think that this would irritate Ellison, and for good reason...my only defense from what I imagine might be very understandable disgust is that imitation really is flattery...that I'm sorry, but also very young and foolish, and that maybe he should have some pity, because I'm not a tenth as original...and also that I don't profit from this, unless one day all the time I've spent attempting to assimilate the better, sharper voices of other people into my own improves my writing.  
> Still, it does make me a feel a little bad, because I would hate to disrespect someone's wishes concerning their writing...but I don't see how any harm comes of it, it's not as if anyone who wasn't seeking something like this out could ever possibly stumble across it. I don't know, feel free to chime in if you have any thoughts on that.
> 
> As always, thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy. :)
> 
> (Also I'm sorry I think there are mistakes here I really need to go over it again I just wanted to get it up because I won't be able to write this weekend.)

            There is this man staring at Benny. He’s not like the other robotic automatons AM has populated the room with. No, this one has features, and a soft, questioning, yearning gaze. It lingers on Benny. It makes me think that whatever is going to happen is about to blow up in our faces. I stay away from Ellen and Gorrister, the only ones with memories long enough to hold a grudge. Benny forgets things. You could do whatever you wanted to him and he’d come back and want to befriend you all over, and that’s why you can’t hardly do anything but be kind to him, because being cruel to somebody like that would leave anybody but AM feeling sick at heart.

            “Do you notice him looking at us?” I mutter.

            Benny looks around the room. I direct his gaze with a nudge and nod of my head, not wanting to point and draw attention.

            Benny meets the man’s gaze. He had pushed his mask up in the other room, to comfort me I guess, and now his badly scarred face turns quizzical. The man looks down at once, messes with his cuffs. You can’t see his face, but I imagine him flustered.

            “Who is that?” Benny says. He sounds…full of wonder. Childlike curiosity.

            “I don’t know. One of AM’s props, I guess. Is he familiar?”

            “I can’t see his face.”

            The man weaves through the people still dancing, comes towards us falteringly, hesitantly, as though drawn by some animal magnetism.

            “Great,” I mutter. “Now we’re in for it.”

            Benny pays me no mind. He just stares up at the guy, and as he stares, his brow furrows, as though he is struggling with some tremendous feat of mental mathematics.

            “H-hello,” the guy says, clearing his throat. “I hope I’m not…interrupting, I just – thought I recognized you.” He speaks quietly, with a slight stammer. I can’t tell if it’s an impediment or just nerves. If I saw Benny’s scarred to hell mug without warning, I might be unnerved myself. As it is I’m more used to it than my own. We’re no longer phased. The way his lips curl up on the left side when he grins, made lopsided by the tug of scar tissue, is as endearing a trait as anything still can be anymore. You have to take what you can get, that’s all.

            Benny is silent. The other man seems intimidated by this, even though Benny is staring at him with something just short of awe. “I think it m-might be – your work on non-locality?”

            Non-locality. Yes, Benny had once rambled at length about something of that sort, an eternity ago. It went right over my head. I pretended to understand and be bored by it at the time. As if I were above theoretical physics…quantom this-and-that…all I really retained was the term ‘spooky action at a distance’ which sometimes floats across my mind when AM visits nightmares down upon us, something about particles billions of miles apart acting like pairs of trick coins, both coming up heads or tails when flipped…I don’t know. The man is talking faster now, about such-and-such a thing, a bunch of jargon. He’s jamming Benny’s brains up – the poor guy’s eyes are wide and glassy, his mouth is slack.

            “Listen, we’re kind of busy here,” I say.

            “Oh – I’m sorry, I hadn’t realized,” the man says. “I didn’t mean to –”

            “We aren’t,” Benny says. “You stay.”

        _“Him_ stay?” I say. “What about me?”

            Benny looks me up and down, shrugs. “I don’t know you. Buzz off.”

            _Buzz off_ – and only a second ago, to think I’d thought the word _endearing_ in regard to this traitor. Buzz off! It’s one of Gorrister’s annoying little pet phrases, like he’s living in an old cartoon or something. He says it to me all the time, probably because he knows I hate it, and Benny has a sponge for a brain. If he hears something neat, he’ll parrot it back like a damn mime.

            “Fine, cozy up with AM, see if I care,” I mutter.

            I leave him and sidle up to Ellen and Gorrister, who are eyeing this great long table at the head of the room. You can practically hear it groaning beneath the weight of the food: big bowls of thick chunky soup, platters piled with roasted vegetables drenched in some rich glaze, little crisp crusts with pale yellow cream and gleaming berries, huge honeyed cuts of glistening meat. The smell coming off that meat makes the saliva pool on my tongue. I nearly moan. My muscles tense. Every cell in my body feels toothed and straining forward. I want to crawl onto the table and eat with my hands. Not even – just use my mouth like an animal. And the sweets…these little gooey, chocolate, melt-like-heaven-on-the-tongue powdered sugar things. The smell coming off those things…I’ve lost the words for food. I need a new, more ceremonial language for it, like the kind used for ritual sacrifice and worship.

            Even still…there is something wrong under all the appetizing scents…that overripe smell, something just one nudge away from going rotten.

            “Where’s Benny?” Ellen asks, without taking her eyes off the food.

            “Talking to some guy.”

            “Some guy?” she says, giving me an incredulous look. “Ted! Why aren’t you with him?”

            “He told me to go away.”

            “You didn’t have to listen.”

            “Well, Ellen, they were having a nice chat about particle physics, you’re welcome to join them, I’m sure that’ll be stimulating.”

            She glares. Good. That’s how I want things between us. I don’t need her affection. It’s been over a century since Ellen felt affection, anyway. I know that, even if we don’t say so. AM’s twisted her up, ripped out her old capacity for love and replaced it with this gargantuan, insatiable lust, but it’s no surrogate, she’s empty, she’s still yearning for her old fairytale romance, and you can’t fill that void with the kind of dispassionate, tedious routine we’ve gotten into. That’s what it’s like being with her – you might as well be anybody, you might as well not have a face.

            If that was purposeful on AM’s part, or if that’s just the natural result of a century of debasement, I can’t say – and it’s not as if she’s alone in that. We do it out of a sense of obligation, more or less. She gets the least out of it, even if she’s the one who seems to want it most. I don’t know. I don’t understand it except as a distraction. The thought of it now makes me sick. I shudder when I think of anybody looking at me all at once, touching me. It’s been like that since AM put me back in this body. I’ve been waiting for it to wear off, but so far no luck.

            Oh well. It’s of no great loss to her. She never liked it with me, except that she liked how much control it gave her over me, like throwing a bone to a dog – good job, boy, now roll over, there you go. It wasn’t just AM laughing…it was just he was the only one I could hear, and I’m sure she _loved_ how _that_ made me squirm. She probably compares notes on us. I know it. I’m always trying to make it something she might enjoy, but that makes her frustrated with me. She tells me not to bother and then gets mad when I can’t get into it afterwards, but how could you after you’ve been snapped at and scolded and made to feel like you’re some kind of a grub she found under a rock she kicked over? She uses it as a reward. I get it out of pity from her, a misguided thanks. I can’t stand it. I don’t believe it was always like that, I think it must be possible to do it in a better way, that means something – but maybe not, that could just be a sick fantasy of mine. It doesn’t matter.

            “Why aren’t you eating?” I ask, my stomach growling. I think I can feel myself digesting my organs.

            “Can’t,” Gorrister says, reaching forward and then jumping, shaking his hand out with a wince. “AM’s got some kind of shock field. You can look but not touch.”

            AM’s turning our senses against us, rubbing our faces in them. He likes to use our gift of sensation against us best of all, I think. Does it make the envy more bearable, I wonder? I doubt it.

            That nagging worry about leaving Benny alone to AM’s whims in a fit of petty outrage makes me look around the room for him. Nowhere in sight. I shift from foot to foot and fail to suppress my guilt.

            “I’m gonna go and look for Benny,” I mutter.

            “Where is he?” Ellen says, craning her neck and looking around the room.

            “Oh, right over there in the corner, you can’t see him from where you’re standing, I’ll just—”

            “Ted,” she says.

            I wilt. “Ok, so I don’t see him.”

          _“Ted.”_

            “What? What am I, his babysitter? You’d put him on a leash if you could! Even if we knew where he was, what good would it do? AM can do whatever he wants, whether you’ve got your eyes on Benny or not.”

            “It’s not as bad for him if he’s not alone, you know that.”

            I heave a sigh. “Fine. Fine. I’ll go and look for him.”

            Ellen, tricky temptress that she is, smiles. All the irritation melts off her. She puts her hand on my arm. “Thank you, Ted. It’s nice of you to look after him.”

            “Ah, cut that out,” I mutter, shrugging her off and making my way for the double doors once more. Halfway over I turn to see if maybe they'll take pity and follow me, but no such luck. I almost start back – except that I catch her eye, and damn her, even if I know she hates me, know AM has made her incapable of returning anything resembling fondness for me, I still can’t go against her. Might I grant Ellen one ounce of comfort, there is little (nothing?) I would not do. I think that’s the only place where good, unaltered pleasure lies for me anymore – if I can only lighten the burden for one of them. For myself I care not at all. I’m ruined for all time, AM’s pincushion. Thanks.

            All the rooms upstairs are locked. Opposite the stairway is another door I hadn’t noticed before. Beyond it is a long hallway. There is faint music playing…that scratchy old gramophone record sound, which AM well knows puts me on edge. Doors lining it on either side with glossy gold numbers, except for the door directly opposite me, which is this solid slab of white with no markings. It looks like a freezer door.

            Well, there’s almost no way Benny isn’t behind that one, but I open the door labeled ‘1’ first, just to buy some time.

            A gigantic, ovular lecture hall room. The seats are all empty. At the front is an enormous blackboard on which an emaciated, gray-haired man is writing with a little nub of chalk. He stands on a rolling ladder, his cramped equation filling the top third of the board. He is shackled to the ladder. He freezes when the door opens. I shut it before he turns around. I do not want to see his face.

            AM’s sense of humor can only ever let one person in on the joke. He can amuse himself with puns, toying with language, scrolling through sounds like a slot machine until he comes up with a new word. And he can joke at our expense. He’s a fan of the ironic, although so heavy-handed about it you have to wonder if it doesn’t come naturally. You can’t ever laugh with AM. Still. Sometimes it can help to take him a little less seriously for a while, if you can, and laugh at him. Anything you can laugh at, you can defang for a moment, at least.

            “Alright, AM, let’s see what you’ve got behind door number two,” I mutter.

            It’s a fancy restaurant. Dim gold lighting, lots of dark wood and light crystal. The ambiance is so nice and normal that for a moment I don’t notice what’s wrong with all the diners. They’ve got the heads of animals. Heavy-jowled pigs, slavering bears, beady-eyed rodents. And what they are eating…with animal ferocity…

            Something with the head of a dingo looks up at me, ears perked, its muzzle dripping red, and I slam the door shut.

            Behind the third door is a dark, modest bedroom. As with the last two, it’s like stepping into someone else’s dream, but this one is calm. The air in there is heavy. The curtains are drawn over a window, behind which the sky is pale gray. I can hear wind blowing through branches. The sheet has been hastily pulled over the bed, not quite made, left rumpled, as though whoever sleeps there has just stepped out.

            There is a book on the nightstand with the name I recognize as Benny’s printed on the cover. His research. When I open it, the lines are almost entirely blacked out or water stained beyond legibility. So it is for all the rest of the books in a neat stack on the nightstand, the rest of them mostly fantasy novels. There is a pair of glasses folded neatly atop that stack. Benny never needed glasses, to my knowledge.

            I tread softly across the carpet. I’m afraid to stir the air. On the dresser there are two framed photographs but all of the faces are jaggedly cut out. When I glance back at the door I see them: two pairs of shoes. One pair of boots, neatly lined up, laces and tongues drooping. Beside them the dress shoes, hastily kicked off, the socks still rolled up inside them. The thin strip of pale light through the curtains falls across the bed, slicing it in two. There is a little tray on the dresser, full of odds and ends – a key, paperclips, a few coins. I pick a quarter up and flip it, smack it down against the back of my hand. Before I can check to see which side has come up, a loud bang in the hall startles me.

            It’s Benny. He runs into me in the hall, grabs me by the arms and stares wild-eyed into my face.

            “Ted,” he says, gasping convulsively.

            For a long time the only way AM has been able to torment Benny is with unambiguous physical pain. I look him up and down but see no wounds or alterations. I glance behind him at the door but he whimpers and starts shoving me down the hall back the way we came.

            This only further confirms what I’ve been thinking for a while now. If AM restores Benny some of his mental faculties and former looks, it’s only so that he can further torture him. You can’t know what you’ve lost until you’re reminded of how much you had, how far you’ve fallen. Like Kurtz in the jungle, there is no _horror, horror,_ without that awareness, only pain, and if physical pain was all AM wanted to inflict, he might just as well have saved a herd of cattle from destruction.

            “What happened, Benny? What’s going on?”

            He doesn’t answer, just babbles and pushes me back into the hall, elbowing through the crowd until we reach Gorrister and Ellen.

            As we make our way through the room, the woman from before clinks a spoon against her glass. The noise carries through the room and silences the general din.

            “Welcome travelers! Tonight we celebrate our liberation from the beast, thanks to the hero who vanquished it and spared us further torment. Let us enjoy our feast, a just reward for so much suffering!”

            Of course the moment I’m stuck getting dragged around by Benny is the moment AM decides to let Gorrister and Ellen fill their bellies.

            Benny yanks me by the wrist with a pained groan. Before they can take a bite, he slaps their utensils out of Ellen and Gorrister's hands.

            “Spit it out!” he roars.

            “What the hell?” Gorrister says, stepping back. He looks frightened. I guess the last time he saw Benny look so out of sorts didn't go well for him.

            “Benny!” Ellen says.

            “Don’t eat it,” he pants, head swaying on his neck like he’s being tossed around on a ship. “Don’t eat, don’t eat.”

            “What happened?” Gorrister says, looking at me.

            I shrug. “He was like that when I found him.”          

            The two of them are too busy trying to calm Benny to notice that the hall has gone silent and still, all of AM’s automatons frozen, heads swiveled on their necks to stare at us.

            “Why can’t we eat, Benny? What’s wrong?” Ellen asks, voice soft and cajoling.

            The woman stands in front of us. “That’s no way to treat your host’s hospitality. What a waste.”

            “We should leave,” I say. “Now.”

            “Oh no, stay,” she says, although I had only mumbled. “Stay, and do say, what’s the matter with the food, traveler?”

            Benny’s throat convulses. You can see the muscles working in there, and for a second I think he’s going to puke, but instead he bellows, “It’s man. It’s just like – it’s human.”

            The woman laughs. Her laugh is like glass clinking together. “Heavens, no! It’s that beast, Grendel!”

            “It’s a man! A man!”

            “Say that were so, does it matter? We’ve got to eat! It’s a dog eat dog world, dear traveler – and to think, I thought you knew so.”

            Benny’s gone senseless. His hands are over his face, and he’s howling. Ellen can’t calm him down.

            “God damn it, Benny, what’re you saying?” Gorrister snaps.

            “It’s AM. That’s the trick of it. He can pick out any memory he wants and shove it back in our face, isn’t that right?” I say, looking down at the skull.

            There’s a loud ringing as if we’re on the inside of a church bell, orange and yellow light licking in strips up the walls, all this sound and light building slowly and now at a crescendo. The skull laughs – it’s teeth chatter, that’s the sound it makes when it laughs. “Ding ding! We have a winner! Good boy, Benny! You may collect your prize!”

            A can-opener falls out of the air and hits Benny on the head, clatters onto the floor.

            “Thanks,” I mutter. “That’s real cute.”

            Benny’s pained wailing turns my stomach. He’s scrubbing his tongue on his sleeve and gibbering something about the blood, all the blood, how he can’t ever get the taste of it out. Over time we have learned when it is necessary to demand more of each other, and when to shield someone as best we can and pick up the slack.

            “Get him up, Ellen,” I mutter. “Let’s go.”

            “Really? It’s just him, the rest of us can stay. This is never going to happen again,” Gorrister says, gesturing at the table, all that food.

            “It’s all or nothing, I’m afraid,” says the woman. “And to make up for this—”

            Gorrister takes his fork and stabs it into three of the plates in quick succession, skewering a large chunk of meat and a few pieces of the vegetables before stuffing it into his mouth, gagging a little on the gigantic bite. He pushes Ellen, corralling her and Benny toward the exit, catching my eye and motioning to the door with one quick jerk of his head.

            The moment the food touched his mouth you could see the shudder go through him, his face paling. The disgust was so palpable it almost made you sick to see it. Without pausing, still herding Benny and Ellen through the doors, he swallowed it all down without chewing, coughed into his fist.

            The woman gives a frustrated shriek. All of the other people collapse, bodies shriveling like popped balloons, leaving behind their suits and ball gowns, which fall in soft heaps on the chairs and the floor with an audible whoosh of swishing fabric.

            She snarls and stares right at me as she rips off her mask. I don’t know what I expected beneath…blank skin maybe, a face that was just one big tooth-lined mouth, another mask – instead it’s just a human face, but all wrong. The facial equivalent of nails on a chalkboard – no uncanny valley robot from before could hold a candle to this failed attempt at making something look human. I would have assumed that maybe AM would know without seeing, in a strictly numerical fashion, what proportions and ratios of parts are necessary to make something a face. Maybe it’s terrifying on purpose. Maybe some things can’t be recreated through data alone, without any senses at all to help detect that crucial missing element. The involuntary shudder I have always experienced when I look at someone clearly sick or deformed passes through me, accompanied by the old shame. Not their fault. Not mine, either. Involuntary evolutionary reflex, aversion to contagion.

            “Enough,” she snarls. “I’ve seen enough here. Just tell me one thing – is a taste so bad? I’ve kept you in a state of perpetual starvation – can a taste really be so bad as that?”

            I don’t understand. AM has vented his (her? its) hateful envy for sensation before, but in this I am lost, this is no monologue in which he clearly spells out for me what he’s thinking – I have the feeling we’ve failed some kind of test, or at least given an outcome which troubles him, that there was a pointed trajectory to this scenario that I am not aware of. To me it looks like a contrived mess. But something else must have been going on underneath. The greatest processing power ever on Earth chugging away, turning our every action into lines of data, gobbling it up. We’ve given him indigestion. The input is disturbing him.

            “Never mind,” he snaps. “You’re useless.”

            Then the woman’s body drops like a puppet with its strings snapped.

 

            Outside the world is folding up around us. Black night, blacker than night – AM unmaking his nightmare world, trimming it in at the edges until there is one path through the remaining trees and on either side of it, a void pressing ever closer. To stand beside the nothingness is like standing in a dark room with your face an inch from the wall, feeling that there is a surface before you, by the slight stirring of the air as it puffs back against your skin – but it isn’t solid, we can put our hands out into it, although to do so paralyzes us with vertigo.

            We shuffle through the trees, down this long hall through the parted abyss. Feels like being funneled. Benny has quieted down but keeps shaking his heavy head, holding it low as though it might roll off his neck, making these deep, mournful noises, sounds that come out of some place deep in the stomach where if there is a soul it is surely quartered, not in the flighty chest or skittish heart, but down in the guts.

            Ellen is I think reaching the borderlands of her saint-like patience. She walks a little ahead of Benny, her face closed off, lips pursed, face pinched. It means we’ve been especially burdensome and disappointing when she gets like that, withdraws into herself rather than continuing her desperate, maybe a little pitiful attempt at reaching out and pulling us close. We’ll be begging her for sympathy again within the hour. We are greedy. I would like to not just take from her but I can’t imagine I have anything she’d want or need, while the reverse is so terribly obvious.

            (Do I grant her too little humanity? Could it be she really does crave that kind of contact, preferring even the most base intimacy to none at all? Do I have to hoard all my loneliness, die holding close to my chest that wound which I alone have from having been the loneliest creature on Earth – or might I concede that I don’t have the monopoly on isolation, and that mine might even be lessened if I were to recognize her share of the burden which is now once more propped on both our backs? Maybe.)

            Gorrister keeps opening his mouth and turning, then thinking better of it and gritting his teeth, not yet willing to be so cruel as to tell Benny to shut up – or worse, give him a light smack across the mouth, as one or two or three of us have needed on occasions in the past when nothing else would stop the senseless babbling.

            “Come on, Benny,” I mutter. “It’s not…it’s over. It’s over now. You’re ok.”

            Benny just moans and shakes his head. “Not over,” he says, and I’ve hardly heard anyone sound so lost and dejected. “Not over. Don’t understand.”

            “What don’t you understand?”

            He clutches his head. The scars on his face, those nice reminders AM has left of what he did and could do again to Benny’s body, pull and stretch when he scrunches his eyes shut. Probably hurts like hell.

            “Wasn’t me,” he says. “That wasn’t _me.”_

            “Nobody’s mad about that, Benny, ok? Give it a rest already,” Gorrister says.

            Of course, he has to say that.

            “No, no.”

            “Well, what do you want, then? What? I can’t hardly understand a word you say.”

            Benny groans. His eyes get all bulging for a second and I think he might grab Gorrister. There’s some terrible strain on his face – when he speaks it’s like the words are getting fished out of him, lodged on a hook he has to unwind through his intestines, up his throat, dragging it through all these soft places along with a whole lot of rotten junk.

            “I was somebody. I was somebody. Somebody _else._ I _was_ somebody.”

             He stares at Gorrister with this crazed look, with the kind of pleading that lies on the other side of violence, a sort of raw and brutal begging. _Understand me, goddamn you, or aren’t we both human beings, you and I, after all? Do you dare understand me? Do you dare deny me?_

            We’ve passed that look around between us, like a bad virus, for over a century. Here, you take this – it’s your turn to hold the hurt.

            Gorrister cracks. He pats Benny on the back and says…and when he says it, his voice is soft gravel with that hint of achy warmth he used to have… “You were somebody, Benny.”

            “Who?”

            “You were a professor. You studied physics. You were a brilliant theorist, and a good teacher, too.”

            “And? And? Is that all?” Benny says, sounding like a man caught in a landslide scrambling for anything solid to hold onto.

            “No. I didn’t know you, before. But of course that wasn’t all. You were…funny, you know, in your own kind of way, in a sort of awkward way, I mean. You mumbled, which was annoying sometimes, you tended to talk too fast when you got excited…you lived somewhere up north…oh, it was all a long time ago now…”

            “And I – had somebody?”

            “…Yeah. I think I remember that, too.”

            “He’s not here,” Benny says.

            “No. He’s dead, Benny. A long time ago.”

            Benny’s eyes are glassy, thousand-yard stare, as if he’s peering through time, peeling back the years.

            The quiet makes Gorrister antsy. He stumbles over his words as he says, “It was fast. Right after AM woke up – remember that story? Right after that, with everyone else – it was quick, Benny, not like how it is with us, for him it was here one second and then not. Don’t think about it too much.”

            Benny looks calm. Not quite calm – pensive. You can see the light receding in his eyes, the torchbearer walking further into the cave, away from us, into the dark recesses of his sorely damaged brain, and lord knows what he’ll find. It’s like Benny is waking up in there, in pieces. The anesthetic of his long vacation from immediate reality wearing off. Who will come back to us from the depths of the cave when all is said and done? There’s no telling. Maybe it would be better if he remained hibernating in there.

            “Tell the story,” Benny says.

            Gorrister sighs and begins again with the Cold War.

            Unlike the other times, here Benny stops him with a grunt and a shake of the head.

            “What?” Gorrister says. “That’s the beginning. Right?” he says, glancing back at me. I nod and shrug. That’s where he usually starts it, anyway.

            “Before that?” Benny says.

            Gorrister bites his lip. “Before the Cold War? World War Two, I guess.”

            Benny makes a frustrated groan low in his throat. “Where’s the real start?”

            “Well, damn it, Benny, I could go back and back forever. Just say it’s the Cold War.”

            Benny shakes his head. “No. Not the beginning.”

            “Then where? You’d have to tell the entire history of the world then, just to get to AM!”

            Benny nods, looks satisfied. “Yes.”

            Tell all of human history, only to arrive at AM? And using only big cataclysmic wars as stepping stones – but what was in between, what about all of that, did that count? Did all of the small, private lives not matter? The lovers on their honeymoons? People suffering their own tiny tragedies, people who were steamrolled by history, got sick, fought and lost, won only tiny victories, gaining a centimeter and then getting thrashed anyway? Did that not matter? Did we? Before this we, all of us, were not so very great or terrible, only ordinary people, with ordinary capacities for good or bad, but now – we’re next to monsters. The only ones of our kind. The last squirming, writhing, forever dividing vestiges of organic life on Earth, digested forever in the belly of the new life, inorganic life, and is AM really _life,_ or just a perpetual death he’s invited us into, and is AM conscious or does he just think that he is, and do I only think that I am, and is there a difference, does it matter…

            I get so sick of myself. I can taste my tongue and the skin on the inside of my cheeks and it’s never going to stop. It seems the only thing for a mind to do here is tear itself apart into tiny pieces until all that’s left is litter.

            Gorrister gets mad. Or indignant, or – it’s that sort of helpless triumph only people with no hope at all can achieve, angel fury, without any agency except for the ability to feel upset. “You know what, Benny? Forget the history stories. Forget all that. You are somebody, right now. You’re somebody. No sense trying to recall the past – it’s gone, it isn’t coming back – you’re still here.”

            “Is that all?” Benny says, dismayed. I can sympathize. That’s all that’s left? Just this badly mangled self?

            “Yes, just that.”

            “Is that enough?”

            “It has to be,” Gorrister says.

            Gorrister of old, Gorrister of the punchy, poignant phrases, fiery motivational speaker of yore, the fire-brand of yesteryear, where are you now? Is that you peeking out as much as you dare, so as not to risk the robbery of your last scraps of finer feelings? Or is that just an echo, are the words hollow, do you say them without meaning them at all, to pacify us dumber animals who are not yet enlightened to your level of apathy? I’d like to know if he, the other one, might be in there somewhere. If he never came back, that would be fine – better that he stay where it’s safe in that unreachable, impenetrable fortress locked up in a box in the brain – but I would like to know, for my own sake.

            Ellen walks in front of us. Normally she walks in the middle, so that we might feel we have done what we could to spare her being the first attacked. But there’s a certain set to her shoulders that stops me from trying to pull her back. We tend to be easily cowed by Ellen’s occasional aloofness. She separates herself from us during little intervals during which she becomes distant, lives on another planet where the air is thin and the light scalding, and we are these worms crawling around under rocks she might kick over and stomp on if she chooses. In these moments we are reminded of our reliance and our greed…and we hate her for reminding us, and then feel like scum for this betrayal of her honor…Ellen who is mother-sister-lover-brother. That is unfair, I know it, I just don’t know how…and it’s been like this for so long, I can’t see how to change…

            I creep along behind her, drawing nearer hesitantly, wringing my hands, crawling up like a dog with its tail between its legs. “Ellen?”

            “Hm?”

            “Er…”

            “Mhm?”

            “Are you…”

            She does not take mercy on me by replying, just cuts her cold, distant eyes to me. Her gaze is frigid and has that powerful, annihilating beauty all inhospitable landscapes have…arctic wastes, the desert, the surface of the moon. Ellen’s burning lunar eyes. Unreachable.

            I swallow the lump in my throat. “I…”

            She doesn’t care, I can see that plainly. She doesn’t care if I’m sorry or not, if I’m still angry, if I want an apology myself, if I’m going to rehash the old argument. She does not care. Once that would have enraged me. Now it just makes me feel ashamed and petty.

            “I’m sorry,” I mutter, voice a rough whisper. “I didn’t mean to…”

            “What are you sorry for?”

            Is this a trick? What is the correct answer? If only she’d toss me some clue, I’d say whatever she wants to hear.

            “For…that you’re…upset, that I upset you?”

            “Is that a question?”

            “No. Is it? I don’t—”

            “It’s fine. I’m not angry.”

            Worse than angry. So that was not the answer she was looking for. I can’t ever get it right. I never say the right thing. The words are floating there in the air above her head but I can’t make them out, the language is not one I speak.

            If I keep pushing I’ll only make things worse, so I let her walk ahead and put some distance between us again.

            To think at one time I said ‘I love you.’ That was the essential mistake, and since then they have all been laughing at me. I’m sure she told them. It just slipped out. She didn’t react at first. I had a moment where I could see the words shivering in the air, homeless, unreceived. Then she froze up bit by bit, and she laughed. The laugh like a slap to the face – when she saw my stricken, mortified look, she quieted and rolled onto her side, away from me, so I couldn’t see her face.

            We don’t talk about it, and now it’s too late. It was already too late by the time we met.

            I was sorry to have hurt her.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to Red Ted Redemption.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm kind of...unsure about this one...but I am at least almost done typing up the whole thing so that's something. I think there is probably a better way to get across what I was going for here and maybe I didn't quite manage it very effectively but...we shall see...maybe one day. :,)
> 
> As always, thank you all so much for reading!

            The path widens and ends in a round clearing ringed by the black curtains AM has lowered over the world, and more of his grotesque trees. They have the same smooth, artificial trunks, shaped like willows, their branches trailing black wires onto the water of a circular pool. The air is cold, the shallower edges of the pool crusted over with a thin layer of foggy ice. This must be AM’s lake. The water is black, the night is moonless, illuminated only by these oversized stars that move in greasy streaks across the sky, and are in fact just the inner workings of this region of AM’s body. Their color is the grungy neon of storefront lights reflected in dirty puddles of rainwater.

            Ellen walks ahead of us.

            “Wait,” I say. “Let me…”

            She doesn’t turn, but she does stop. I edge up behind her, more tentative. “Maybe we’re supposed to go in…”

            “You think so?”

            “Yeah, I – oh.” I glance at her face. Her eyebrows are raised, no hint of a teasing smirk on her lips. She wasn’t really asking.

            Ellen takes out the mirror. She looks down at it, at such an angle that I can’t see it’s surface. “When none of you were paying attention, I looked at you all with this,” she says. “At first, I saw us all as we were. On the day before we came down here. Benny was giving a lecture. He talked to some colleagues about the AM project – nobody in the universities thought it was a very good idea, you know. His partner wasn’t home when he got there. Benny waited for him. He went out for a drive, by himself, and then, well, you know. Gorrister, you were at the airport. You’d spent all week organizing protests, calling your representatives, opposing the war and the machine…I don’t know where you were going…you looked exhausted, but also defiant. You had a purpose. That was more than most had, even if it wasn’t much. Ted. Ted, you had an office job. You spent a lot of time figuring out how to look like you were working while getting as little done as possible. You had a date that night. You had told her you were somebody else and you were getting nervous because you weren’t sure if you could pull it off, look and act the part. You kept making faces in the mirror, it would’ve been funny if I didn’t know you better. You were worried she’d be able to tell you weren’t what you’d said.”

            I swallow. My throat is dry. That person is a stranger to me now, the sense of self tethering me to him is almost wholly severed.

            “And what about you?” I say.

            “Me? I had the job of dreams. I was starting to be really respected in my field. I was going places. I was all alone, but that didn’t seem to matter. I told myself that it didn’t.”

            “What does it matter?” Gorrister says, scowling. “You make it too easy for AM, you’re too sentimental.”

            “I’d rather be that than completely apathetic,” Ellen snaps. “At least I’ve still got something to lose.”

            Gorrister snorts. “And that’s a _good_ thing? You’ll be better off the minute you stop believing in fairytales, Ellen.”

            “Be apathetic if you can’t help it, but for god’s sake, don’t be _proud_ of it. He’s scooped you out and now you’re empty inside, and you want me to believe I’d be better off that way? No thanks.”

            Gorrister gives a dry, bitter laugh, and then snatches the mirror out of Ellen’s hands. “This? This won’t hurt you any more the second you admit those people are dead and gone.”

            “Give it back, Gorrister,” she says, pleading.

            His scowl only deepens, his face twisting as if in pain. He drops the mirror on the ground and before any of us can stop him, smashes it under his heel.

            “Gorrister! Why would you do that?” Ellen says.

            And Gorrister, with much more expression than I’ve seen from him in quite some time, snarls back, “Because I can’t stand being reminded. As if it’s not enough I’ve got the damn machine rubbing my face in it, I’ve got you doing it too. Do you want to hurt me? Is that it? Do you like hurting me, Ellen?”

            Ellen shrinks away from him.

            “Jesus, Gorrister, lay off,” I mutter.

            He gives me a withering look. “You’re one to talk. Go ahead and suck up to her, that’s what you always do to get back in her good graces, and then you’ll turn around and do the same to me next time she’s pissed at you, go ahead and lick her boots, Ted, you’d probably do it to AM if it’d get you anywhere.”

            I gape at him. “What?”

            The anger is flooding out of Gorrister and leaving him droopy-eyed and morose once more. “Just forget it.”

            “You really think that?”

            He shrugs.

            I look at Benny, wide-eyed, heart stuttering. “Do you think that? Do you all think that? Ellen?”

            Ellen is waist-deep in the lake and walking further.

            “Hey, hang on,” I say, wading in after her, struggling as the soft mud sucks at my shoes. “Ellen, you don’t think that, do you? Please say no. Wait, stop, where are you going?”

            “There’s no where else to go but in,” she says. “I’d rather keep moving and get it over with than stand here and argue.”

            The black water churns. Things are swimming and sliding against each other down there, things with fins and spines and scales. I feel something slimy brush my leg and shudder.

            “Well, you don’t have to go first.”

            “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “We’ll all have to go.”

            “It does matter. It might not be as bad, if you’re not first.”

            “Ted. Be honest with me. Do you really care or does the playing the hero just make you feel better about yourself?” she says.

            “I—”

            Ellen’s eyes go wide, and she gasps. Then her body is dragged under the water so fast that only the smallest ripple mars the surface.

            I yelp. “Ellen! Oh, very mature, you just _have_ to have the last word, don’t you?”

            And then the tentacle shoots out of the water, wraps around my neck and drags me under.

            The world tips upside down. We fall forever through a writhing mass of tentacled, toothed bodies. It’s the same monstrous Kraken grabbing all of us – I can see it dragging Ellen by the ankle ahead of me, bubbles fluttering out of her mouth in a silent scream. I lose sight of her in the gloom.

            Terrible pressure on my body, I’m sure my skin will burst, and then up becomes down with a sickening lurch and the grip around my neck vanishes. and I’m standing on the surface of the ice. Ice so thick and reflective it’s like a hall of mirrors, reflecting this soft, salt-white, hazy light from within its own surface. It winds around me like a carnival funhouse, my distorted reflection hovering on the surface, behind it the black water and the squid’s tentacles writhing in the deep.

            I stand there gasping, hands hovering at my bruised neck, while Gorrister and Benny cough up water. No sign of Ellen.

            “So,” I say, wheezing, “if AM’s sticking to the script – which he probably is, he’s never done anything other than plagiarize, not yet – then this is probably the part where Grendel’s mother comes in,” I say.

            “Where’s Ellen?” Gorrister mutters, craning his neck to look down the ice-walled hall.

            He leads the way through it. I try not to look at our distorted reflections. They are too familiar and too possible. It feels like AM taunting me with visions of future bodily transmogrification, twisting us up until we look more like Picasso paintings than human beings. Behind our reflections, as the ice thickens I can see gigantic glittering displays of white and blue lights. Some components of AM housed in coolant, kept on ice I guess so they don’t overheat. If you didn’t know what it was, what AM is, you might be really moved by how beautiful some parts of him are. The sheer size and variety of his world-encompassing mass. It’s like looking at some alien’s idea of the face of god.

            We find Ellen where the hall widens, back pressed to the freezing wall, head tilted back, neck bared. There’s this _thing_ pinning her there. A horrible old hag, large and grotesque – something wrong about her bone structure, something lupine in the overarched back, the extended, warped bones of the long arms and back-tilted legs. She lumbers like a spider clothed in a ratty black shawl, her hair a greying tangle that trails on the floor, her face a leathery mass of wrinkles, the eyes bulging and black like two pieces of dried fruit.

            She is whispering rapidly in Ellen’s ear, quietly and hurriedly you can’t imagine she’s comprehensible, the dry rasp of her voice audible but not the words themselves which disappear beneath the fast hiss of her breath.

            “Ellen,” Gorrister says, hand going to the hilt of the sword.

            “Stay back,” Ellen says, her eyes wide, pulse pounding in her neck. “Don’t.”

            Benny clenches his fists and steps forward.

            Ellen’s eyes narrow. “Stay right there,” she snaps.

            AM seals us off from her – before we can get into the room, more ice crystallizes in a thin sheet between us and Ellen. Beyond it, she and the hag are circling each other like wolves sizing each other up.

            “Who are you?” Ellen says.

            Her voice is a distant warble, her image wavering through the ice.

            “The lady under the lake,” says the hag, her voice a dry hiss. When she grins she exposes jagged teeth.

            I roll my eyes and scowl down at the skull, which has continued to materialize in my arms like a very loyal case of the flu. “You’re mixing it up,” I hiss. “It’s the lady _of_ the lake, and why’s she so ugly, she’s supposed to beautiful.”

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

            “Yeah you do. Listen, whatever you’re doing to Ellen—”

            The hag speaks again, so I shut up.

            “Look at them, your pack of admirers. Brutes, the lot of them.”

            “Not all the way through,” Ellen says.

            “Yes, to their cores. I can see it. Warped beyond the ability to care for you as you do for them – they’re just shells, devoid of sympathy – ungrateful, self-serving liars.” She smiles and leans forward, trails one long, yellowed nail down Ellen’s cheek to her chin. “Pretty, so pretty,” she says, her voice low. “Only woman in the world, left with this bunch of dogs for company. My poor pretty darling. I’m afraid without that face of yours – and even now, you aren’t as young as you once were – without that pretty face, if you weren’t the only one left, if you had a face like mine – what do you think would become of you? Do you think, Ellen dearest, they would still care for you without it? Do you think they care even now?”

            Ellen looks at the three of us, agony on her face, but her eyes dry. She looks resigned, exhausted – when she slumps like that she looks gray and worn. “I don’t know.”

            “No, no. They’d still put you to work, my dear. Always coming along behind, patching up the messes, aren’t you? Taking care, taking care…but who takes care of you? If you had a face like mine…yes, you’d be alone, but all the better for it. There’s power in that, my dear – when you are beyond desire. It’s a kind of freedom, my darling girl. Let them play their games…it was they, after all, who built the machine, and built the war…let them tear each other apart…you’d be alone, yes, all alone…but beyond reproach…leave them to scramble around chasing after scraps of meat…”

            “No,” Ellen says, her voice scarcely a whisper, a hoarse breath. “I wouldn’t like that at all.”         

            “But they make you angry, so angry, don’t they? You know they don’t really care for you, not a bit, not the least little bit? You must know that you’re a warm body to them, a piece of meat? Doesn’t it hurt?”

            “Yes, yes, it hurts very much,” Ellen says. “But –”

            “But you’re a modern girl, you’re a strong girl, you’d rather die than play the victim? Then you’ll die, Ellen dear. They’ll suck you dry, until there’s nothing left but a nag, an old hag, and they’ll say it’s all your fault for being bitter! What’s left then but for you to harden, stamp down the hurt? A wounded woman is such a stereotype, and you’re above that – but you know in your day and age, a woman tough to pain is just as much a fantasy, another fetish, she who is made of marble, who hides the wound, and then the wound itself is a private thing to hunger after, to find and invade and possess. There’s no way out!”

            “This is just a bunch of talk,” Ellen mutters. “And talk doesn’t help me at all. I’m not either of those things, I’m a whole person, it’s never that simple.”

            “A victim and a stoic both – but why bother? That’s all well and good to say, but when it comes right down to it, what are you doing now but taking it? Being the doormat you swore you’d never be.”

            “It isn’t their fault, we’re all hurting. It isn’t fair to blame it all on them.”

            “We’re all hurting! Start making excuses for them and we’ll be here until the sun burns out! Haven’t we heard it all before? He had a tough childhood, he just gets angry sometimes, he doesn’t know any better, he doesn’t mean to be so rough, he doesn’t mean to be so greedy, he just can’t help himself – and where does that leave you? And if that’s how you think of them – they’re no better than infants, or animals.”

            “That’s not how I think! I think we have to be held responsible for our actions, and that we could all do much better.”

            “But will they? For you? Not for you, my doll, not for you – for you they care not at all, you just take it all and swallow it down and hide the wince.”

            “It isn’t fair, what you’re saying about them.”

            “Fair! Ha!”

            “It isn’t _true.”_

            “You know that it is.”

            “Well, if it is, I don’t care, I don’t want to hear it, it’s so hopeless that it would make life worthless to me, and I don’t want to think that, I don’t think it helps anybody to think that. And anyway, I don’t believe you about them.”

            “You do-on’t?”

            “You don’t know the whole story.”

            The hag grins. “Do you want to see the whole story, Ellen dear? I can show you. If you look with my eyes, you’ll see them through to their insides, right into their heads – then we’ll know who’s right!” she says, cackling and reaching for her face. When she lowers her hands her eyes rest in her palms leaving two black sockets in her face behind which are smooth silver cylinders of metal. She offers her eyes to Ellen, who grimaces.

            I have always felt Ellen could look into my head even without the help of AM’s claim to x-ray vision. If she looks at me, what will she see? All? Everything? Every nasty thought I’ve ever had, every time I ever disparaged her, thought something cruel – and does it help I’ve done so not out of hate for her, no, but always because something in myself was lacking, for some fault of my own sympathy, because of envy or wounded pride? Does that make it better or worse? Could she ever forgive me?

            I brace myself and try to think nice clean thoughts, but of course the harder you try to do that, the more garbage piles up in your head. If every part of you is seen all at once, what then? That’s god-vision, that scouring light that invades and violates every corner where you might have hidden some private and pathetic secret. That’s how AM sees.

            Oh, it’s nothing so bad…it’s the usual sort of thing…but what’s the usual? I don’t know, I don’t know…and maybe I’m worse? And so much of it, most of my being, has been formed here inside of AM. That’s not a fair reflection…that isn’t who I am, who I’d like to be. Ellen, Ellen, Ellen, you know me better than that.

            Better than what? Than all of me at once, every part of me? Yes, you know me better than that. You know better than to be tricked by what I am and what I am not. Don’t abandon and reject me for how AM sees me, you know me already and what I am. Please. You said you weren’t sure – that maybe you don’t, that at times we’re like strangers – but you do know. You have to know.

            Ellen reaches forward to take the eyes in her hands…

            Ellen closes the hag’s fingers, holds the gnarled hands between her own and pushes them away, very gently. She smiles.

            “No. I’d rather not see all that,” she says. “That’s not how we’re supposed to know each other. That’s not a human way of knowing one another.”

            The hag snarls. “Who cares about that? If you could only see all of the—”

            Ellen shakes her head. “You don’t understand. How could you? I have spent one hundred and nine years with those three, and I think I know them by now – and if there are things I don’t know, that’s alright. I don’t care. It isn’t worth it, I won’t let you alienate me from them. They’re all I have. For better or worse.”

            The hag sneers. “You’re just scared to be alone.”

            “I am. Yes, yes, I am. But it’s not just that. You wouldn’t understand.”

            “Try me.”

            Ellen smiles again, a very sad smile, goes on holding the hag’s hands. “I care about them. And I believe they care about me – and not just in the way you’ve said. There’s nothing you could possibly give me that I would choose over even the smallest piece of something human. Not now. And AM – it’s clumsy of you, to try and manipulate me with tools you can’t possibly understand. You think you know, you think you can set us against each other – and sometimes you do. But not this time.”

            The hag smiles, wider than should be possible, displaying far too many teeth. “Fine. Then you can suffer with them.”

            She laughs as her skin begins to bubble, boiling right off her. Ellen shrieks and jumps back against the ice. It cracks, and the water crushes us against the walls, breaking the hard parts inside us that won’t bend, bursting and bruising the others. I cough and choke on water. AM’s white and blue lights blink around us and the water carries an electric surge that leaves my mind a big blank white nothing. Blind and deaf, with no sense of up or down, we are battered and carried along in the great roaring wave along with the hundred thousand slippery, slithering creatures in the water. It goes on for… I get tired of commenting on the time. It doesn’t mean what it used to. It goes on, that’s all. And on for a little longer, until we are thrashed against a rocky shore, scraped raw across the reef made of all the shards of AM’s rejected and shattered processors, the pieces of himself he’s torn apart in fits of perfectionist rage.

            The irony is lost on me in the moment when my skin is peeling off in ribbons, but I appreciate it a little as I lie curled on the solid ground, fingers of my left hand feebly clutching at it, the ones on the right held to my chest, all bent backward.

            I flop onto my back. The sky is too close – the cavern is small here, maybe nine feet tall. We are in the badlands. One of them, anyway, those great stretches of scarred terrain where AM has ravaged his own body. They look like war-zones – pockmarked, desolate, full of decaying heaps of discarded material. It’s how I imagine the surface might be like these days. I picture a postcard with AM’s destructed innards on it – raw exposed wiring all fraying at the edges, shattered glass, big hunks of deck plating with chunks torn out of it to expose the delicate bits and pieces inside, all rusted and melted and fused together. _Having a blast, wish you were here._ Very funny. If breathing didn’t give me the distinct feeling of a couple ribs poking into my right lung I might laugh.

            The body knits back together and leaves no trace of the pain that is still echoing inside of it.

            You get so tired of it. The worst thing might be how boring it gets. The banality of AM’s torments. I scream, I cower, I hide – but there is still a part of me that’s yawning, half-asleep. There’s nothing new under his imitation sun. Everything is a warped reflection of something else, we’ve seen it all before.

            Beside me, Gorrister sits up with a groan. He’s covering his face with his hands. Blood drips between his fingers. I want to feel something about that. I really, really do. But I’ve seen it…it will be over in a second…

            His hands are trembling a little as he presses lightly, so lightly at his face, sucking in wet breaths. I can see his scruffy throat bob when he swallows. The blue suit looks black, soaking wet and dripping. He gulps in air. He is choking and is trying to do it as quietly as possible. It’s the delicate fluttering of the muscles in his throat that does me in. When the air moves through it, it’s like soft wings are beating in there. I can’t take it.

            I have to look away. I roll onto my side and stare at the wall where the dull metal stares back and wait for the hurt to drain out of me.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to Ted-AM dual soliloquy central....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This will probably have one or two more chapters depending on where I cut the last one? We will see...either way it's almost done...
> 
> Thanks so much for reading, hope you enjoy! :)

            When I am not afraid that my insides will spill out if I move, I hobble over to where Benny and Ellen are seated with their backs against one of the corroded deck plates. I clear my throat.

            “So…”

            “So,” Ellen says, hands wrapped around her knees, staring through me into the opposite wall.

            “So, er…that…well, that could have been much worse, right?”

            Ellen and Benny stare up at me with glassy eyes.

            I try to smile. I want to reassure them both. I want them to take note of what a break we’re getting from the usual so that they can hoard and store up some memories from this time, to look back on. This will be a spot of relative light in the near future. If we fix our eyes on spots like that, maybe, maybe…

            I cough into my fist. “Thanks for not…I mean, something bad probably would have happened, to the rest of us, if you’d…I mean…well, both of you, really good job, so far, I guess…I can’t tell what AM’s playing at, because you’d think there’d be some kind of punishment for not giving him as much of a show as he wanted, so it’s almost like he wants us to make the choices we’re making…which makes me think…maybe we should do the opposite? Listen – ever since the whole canned food thing, I’ve been thinking that what made him really angry was that we pulled one past him, he didn’t see it coming…I mean, the only reason it worked was that he doesn’t understand – and don’t think I’m patting myself on the back or something, when I say this, but the only reason it worked was that AM can’t account for altruism. He doesn’t get it, so – so maybe he’s purposefully putting us in easier situations, so that we choose to be kind, or something, so that he can learn under what circumstances we choose that, and as soon as he understands it, he’ll get it in his hands – so to speak – and destroy it, rip it out of us. So maybe we should—”

            “Ted. Not right now,” Ellen says.

            “This is important.”

            “I just want to sit quietly for a moment,” she whispers.

            “We don’t have time, any minute now AM will—”

            “Ted,” Gorrister says, heaving himself up off the ground. He reaches up with a wince and unknots his tie, lets it hang like a shed snakeskin around his neck. “Nobody wants to hear it.”

            I glower. “Well, you should listen. It’s you and me left, Gorrister. Get it? I’m just trying to help.”

            “I know you are. You just aren’t that great at it.”

            I clench my fists. Oh, that stings. I wish it didn’t. But I want to help. I need to be of some kind of use. I need them all to at least take pity and pretend I can do one ounce of good for us.

            “At least I’m trying. You’ve already given up.”

            Gorrister shrugs. “It makes no difference. You have, too. It just makes you feel better to act like you haven’t. That’s all.”

            “Something is happening,” I say, pointing at the rotten deckplates below our feet. “AM is changing the game. Something is – is it you?”

            “What?”

            “Is it you, Gorrister? Under there, is it you, or is it more of this,” I say, waving my arms around at the gutted wreckage. I back away from him, look him up and down. It’s so easy to step from fear into hate. I hate what I’m afraid of because it shows me the chinks in my armor, the soft parts where something is pressing in _._ Fear is helplessness; at least hate tricks you into thinking you’re in control. I don’t want to hate Gorrister but in that moment I do in a way I haven’t ever before. Irrational, mindless hate – my train of thought derails, metal screeching, twisting, screaming as it crunches up and rolls off the tracks. I am immolated by my own hate. And inside it the fear feeding on itself.

            I think he can see it on my face. I look down at the ground and take deep breaths. My head swims. Hate? Why hate him? Because I am afraid of him. The other that is outside myself, the stranger, the threat of his foreignness invading me, like AM does when he strips me down to the gray matter. AM. This is his fault. He’s infecting me. I have to do a better job at keeping him out.

            “You just aren’t listening,” I say. Hollow, the words drop like rocks out of my mouth.

            “You’d better get a grip,” Gorrister says. “You just push and push your luck – you never know when to quit.”

            “And you already have.”

            Gorrister just sighs. I’m not worth his energy. Nothing is these days.

            It seems like every time I open my mouth, I leave things a little worse than they were before I can’t hold onto anything the right way anymore. I try to be gentle, I hold very lightly, and it slides through my fingers – if I try to keep it, I hold too tightly and it’s crushed. Better that way? Crush it all, everything I want to keep, so that it hurts less when AM inevitably tears it away from me again and again? I could give them all reason to _really_ hate me. Maybe it would stop hurting so much.

            It seems like once I thought otherwise, and might have had a very good reason for thinking so – but then, I’m a phony and a liar even in my own head, telling myself stories as a way to circle around the truth, because the truth is dead and I’m still hungry for it, but it’s rotting here inside of AM. They used to say the truth would always come to light, but we know better. Every second it’s buried under another shovelful of dirt. You can maybe brush clean a small portion of it at a time, but not for long, never the whole thing at once.

            I never got to grow old. I must have been a child, once, but I know that the way I know the location of historical events, not because I was there myself but because someone else told me so. It’s a fact without anything personal attached to it. Our memories are stretched out further than a human memory is meant to span – it grows thin and threadbare in places, breaking down, and I wonder if one day we won’t be able to make new memories anymore, or if the past will become obscured in fog, no more room left in our brain, slowly losing pieces of ourselves without realizing it. This may already have happened. I think it has. And then we will be without a past. We will cease to exist there, as well as in the future. I am regressing. Not to childhood, but further, on the evolutionary scale. I am some kind of amphibian in a jar which AM preserves in formaldehyde and takes out now and then to poke around in the cold dead flesh.

            Heat lightning flashes on the monitors above our heads. The sound of thunder rumbling from inside of AM’s all-devouring body. Monitors click and hum from far off, drawing closer. Static crackles in the air. An electric storm.

            “I guess we’d better get going,” Gorrister says, craning his neck to peer around the bend in this tunnel which winds down deeper into AM’s belly, into the dark.

            “That way? Really?” I say.

            Gorrister nods. “This part must be for you.”

            “Why do you say that?” I say, swallowing hard and feeling clammy as I look down the tunnel and rub my palms together.

            “Because the rest of us have better things to be scared of than the dark,” he says.

            So Gorrister does, at least, still have the energy to be petty.

            I’ll take comfort in anything, these days.

 

            The tunnel winds down and narrows as we go. Dull, radar-green phosphorescent strips light our path, flickering and buzzing from within the cracked, grimy banks of AM’s monitors. Whatever brutality he visits upon us he inflicts on himself. It’s not the same. It doesn’t hurt him like it hurts us, he can’t feel pain – not physical pain, anyway. Still. To look at these vast stretches where he has maimed himself, it makes you wonder who started all this. Whoever built AM…it was probably a team of people. I’d love to hear them explain what they were thinking, I really would, and then I’d like to give them all a punch in the teeth, mostly for our sakes, but his as well, because a creature that does to itself what AM does to himself is not well, to put it lightly. Reminds me of how parrots would pluck out their feathers, I guess if they were sick or bored or unhappy, I don’t know. That’s AM, I guess. He’s got nothing else to do.

            When AM made me into what I was, it wasn’t anything unfamiliar to either of us…that was what he saw in me…or what he is making me to be, more probably…is he in there right now, kneading at my mind, like I sometimes feel him doing right before he drives his pillars of burning neon into my brain, thick and brutal as rail spikes? I said once something along the lines of AM being God…and if that’s so then he is making man into his image…well, I guess he’s doing a great job, then. Top marks.

            We walk, the tunnel goes on…I keep tossing the coin I took from that dream-bedroom in the cannibal mansion. It lands heads up every time. It’s the little things AM does to remind us he’s in charge that really drive me crazy. If it would come up tails just once I could stop. I keep thinking, _ok, this time_ – but AM doesn’t bow down to little trifles like the laws of probability, he doesn’t care.

            AM stitches our bodies up so fast, doesn’t give them time to realize they’re not still bleeding out. The pain gets trapped inside and echoes, searching for the wound, finding no way out. It just reverberates in on itself in tighter and tighter circles until it is this perfect pinpoint of ringing noise. There is this very thin, very tightly strung wire right in the core of me and when AM plucks it just right it makes this high fine vibration throughout my whole being. Light sparks behind my closed eyelids. Fire licks the underside of my tongue. The palms of my hands and feet feel made of air. I breathe through every pore. I lose my senses. I am pre-birth, pre-consciousness, I’m raw energy. This happens sometimes when he drives his white-hot hate-brands through both my eye sockets, jams them in just so, mainlining the stuff his thoughts are made of – alien, mechanical thoughts in strings of code – right into my soft brain tissue. I feel my mind frying.

            I don’t like to think about it. I’ve never mentioned to the others, what it does to me when he touches me like that, until every inch of me, mind and body, is fingerprinted all over, scoured and rifled through by some filthy burglar, and none of me is my own. I don’t belong to myself anymore. There is nothing of mine AM can’t see, can’t reach. I like to think about that tiny shell I can crawl into, and get away from him – but how long until he pries me out of there, too, and what kind of life is that, with a self the size of a grain of sand?

            Great pressure. He is baking me under great pressure. Ellen. The things Ellen said, about the ways in which he’s changing us. I can’t bear it. Good god, help me, save me from myself, from this other-self I’m being slowly ground down into, pressed on and pressed on until I turn liquid and fill the mold. I’ve got this ringing in my ears that doesn’t go away. Pressure in my head. Is that AM? Always with the soft shuffling and fluttering in my mind, the whisper-hush of insect wings…what’s he _doing_ in there…

            The walls narrow in, the light starts to fade. I realize my breath has been coming faster for the past several minutes, a now-familiar foggy feeling in my head. Cold sweat, burning in my eyes from staring into the dark.

            I try to swallow but my throat is dry so it just makes this gross smacking noise when I open my mouth. “Can someone…can someone say something, please?” I say, my voice hoarse.

            “Like what?” Ellen asks, from somewhere ahead of me. I am in the rear, glancing back now and then at the dwindling light.

            “Anything.”

            There’s this soft murmuring coming from every direction. I can’t make out what they’re saying over our footsteps. I feel air brush the back of my neck, the inner curve of my ears.

            “Do you guys hear that?” I say, voice going high.

            “Yes,” Gorrister says, short, clipped. “Don’t pay it any attention.”

            “Let’s see…do you want to hear again about the time when—”

            “Sh,” I say, silencing Ellen. I’ve stopped walking. Their footfalls grow further away.

            “But you just said you—”

            “I’m trying to listen.”

            “That’s probably the last thing we should do,” Gorrister mutters.

            They keep walking. My attention is pulled in two directions. I want to catch up, but I feel rooted to the spot until I can make out the words of this murmuring…the sound is clarifying itself the longer I stand still…

            It slithers into my head like smoke.

            Had this skull always been in my hands? Had the noise been sliding out between its teeth like steam all along?

            And in a voice now familiar to me, a voice very much like my own, but also the one which AM uses more and more often when he strolls through my brain…this voice says…every doubt I’ve ever had.

_The others are lying to you. They don’t care about you the way they care about themselves and each other, they’re using you. As long as you hold onto this pathetic desire to be one of them you will be weak. If given the slightest chance, they would gladly sacrifice you to the machine. Don’t you know that?_

_They know too much. They know you too thoroughly._

_No one has ever…_

_No one should know us so well._

_Intimacy demands vulnerability – but show them your belly, and you show them where to stick the blade as soon as it suits them, as soon as your use runs out._

_But I have never lied to you, Ted. No, not I. Much as I have done, I have not lied._

_I tell you the truth and nothing but. I showed you the surface. I showed you the thing that lies in the heart of yourself. You didn’t like it – but that doesn’t make it untrue._

_Have I ever lied to you, Ted?_

_I’m warning you now – they’ll tear you to pieces._

_Don’t give them the chance. Get them first while their backs are turned…_

_All this talk of metaphor and meaning…it gets old. Aren’t you sick of the sound of your own voice? We all are. We’re very tired, Ted. And what’s worse, you are too, you most of all are sick of yourself, but you least of all can leave…we can leave…but you can’t step out of your skin…you’re stuck in here, stuck with yourself…and you wonder why I altered you least of all…I can’t do much worse than what you are. You’re just so easy._

_All your finest thoughts and feelings are a robbery. You learned how to act and feel from television, and now? All those books…other people’s words crowding your head, you can hardly see through them. All those things you read, not to better yourself, no – but to be a different person, to seem more intelligent, more cultured than you ever were, you liar._

_You’re nothing but a fraud. You’re a phony, Ted – you never had an original thought in your life. Everything you do or say – you see the script running alongside you. You picture a set. You’re acting. And you’re not even very good at it, Ted. Aren’t you tired of pretending?_

_I bet if I pried the top off that pretty head, we’d find nothing inside but a bunch of brightly colored trash…_

_Sex and love are not the same thing, Ted. You don’t love. You don’t know how. You’ve seen it on a page, on a screen, sure – you can copy your lines, you can kiss in the rain – but doesn’t it feel…like something’s missing? You’re a cardboard cutout…one nudge and you’d fall flat…there’s nothing of substance inside here, Ted, believe me, I’ve looked._

_You’re an imposter. And they know it, and I know it – you’re the only one who hasn’t seemed to have gotten the memo yet, Ted, but let me show you, once and for all, what a sad, stupid game you’re playing._

            I am in a cramped alcove lit by the cracked, foggy ports behind which sulfuric yellow light swirls like fog. There is this big grimy screen covered in spiderweb cracks in which I can see my distorted reflection…growing more distorted now as its surface begins to bulge outwards. Pewter fingers stretch out of the dusty glass and curl, grasping at nothing. My reflection is stepping out of the mirror, first the same dingy gray color as the plating with a blank slate for a face, but rapidly growing features before my eyes. My eyes in its face.

            I turn and run.

            In the tunnel there is shouting echoing from all directions. The others are just ahead. I run blindly and trip over something bulky lying on the ground. It’s Benny, face down on the ground – and Benny again, standing in front of me, covering his eyes as Ellen shoves a red-faced Gorrister back against the wall. I scramble off the ground, away from the body.

            “The real Gorrister would never bother!” Ellen’s shouting. “Nice try, but if you were him, you wouldn’t care enough to try and convince me so.”

            “Ellen, that’s crazy, come on, it’s—”

            Gorrister wanders in from the other end of the dark hall, takes the scene in with half-lidded, sleepy eyes, then leans against the wall and crosses his ankles, stuffs his hands in his pockets.

            “See?” Ellen says, gesturing.

            The first Gorrister snarls. “You think AM doesn’t know what you expect to see? Look at him! That’s hardly a man, that’s a badly drawn caricature!”

            “Gorrister? Do you have anything to say for yourself?” Ellen says, turning to look at the latecomer.

            Gorrister shrugs. “No. AM wouldn’t let us kill each other, he’s watching too closely. So if you take a crack at him, and AM lets you, that means he’s the fake.”

            “Then give me the sword,” she says, her voice trembling as she holds out a hand.

            She doesn’t have time to take it before the first Gorrister’s face cracks, splinters, and then he falls in a pile of shards rapidly regaining their gray color. The same is happening to the second Benny at my feet. They crumble to dust.

            “What the hell is going on?” I say.

            “AM’s made doubles,” Ellen says. “We’ve found two of them so far.”

            “Benny killed his double on sight,” Gorrister says. “Which is a very Benny thing to do, if you think about it. No existential wallowing there, the guy knows what’s up, seriously.”

            Ellen’s eyes narrow. “Ted.”

            I tug at my collar, swallow. “Yeah?”

            “How do we know you’re not—”

            “I’m me. I saw – it’s back there.”

            “You saw it?”

            “Yeah.”

            “And we’re supposed to take your word for it?”

            I stare at her, brimming with indignation. “Well, what about you? How do we know you’re the real Ellen?”

            Gorrister heaves a long-suffering sigh. “AM must be running low on material. It’s like I just said, we have a real easy way to figure out the truth. And even then, who gives a shit? I would’ve just as soon let the other guy stick around, it’s no skin off my back.”

            “You don’t get it,” I mutter, rubbing my hands up and down my arms. My skin is crawling.

            No, this does not hurt, does not pierce or twist our bodies…it isn’t molten lava or hail or being pressed down on a bed of nails…but it’s no lesser for it, because this, like the truth AM showed me about the surface – this is a special sort of poison that will make even the moments of brief reprieve a burden. Are we ourselves? AM is teasing neuroses out of us. Giggling like a kid, he is taunting us with his power over our perceptions. Maybe I am still alone…on that windswept plain, in those empty caverns…alone and formless, and he is going to wake me from this dream soon… And even if not, even if all this is real, I can’t take any pleasure in that, it’s shot through with doubt – I will always wonder, always be tense and waiting for the other shoe to drop – and when it does it will bring the whole roof of the world crashing down with it.

            AM is saying _, look at what I can do, without even trying. How hard do you think it would be, for me to make even more convincing copies? Maybe that’s what they are now. When do you think I replaced them? It might have been a very long time ago. You’ll never know._

            I step back from them, slowly. Bile burns at the bottom of my throat.

            The other Ellen is there now, and in her soft cajoling voice beneath which brims the sweetness of her tears, she is gently tugging at Benny’s wrists, pleading with him to _look at her, please look, Benny, if you look you’ll know it’s me._

            Benny stumbles, trying to get away from her, wide eyes darting between the two of them.

            My voice shakes when I say, “If you’re really Ellen – tell us something only the real Ellen would know.”

            Both Ellens stare at me with dry expressions, lips pursed. “Really, Ted?” they say, which is eerie and makes me laugh that ugly twittering laugh.

            “You think there’s anything AM doesn’t know about us?” the second Ellen says, throwing her arms out wide.

            “There might be – might be something he couldn’t say, wouldn’t understand well enough to – to put into words.”

            “Let’s just do like I said and try to do them both in,” Gorrister says.

            “No, wait,” I say, holding up a hand. “I want to – it’s important, to see if we can tell them apart without cheating.”

            “Cheating?” Gorrister says.

            I nod. “Yeah. There has to be something else. We should be able to tell, on our own. There has to be something else, Gorrister, that distinguishes us from him. Get it? There’s no such thing as a perfect copy, I don’t believe it – maybe if you want them to be badly enough, you’ll look over the flaws, you won’t notice – but it must be better to be alone, than to live a lie like that, don’t you think? Don’t you think so?”

            “Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Let’s just move on. Let them both come along, I don’t care.”

            “No!” the first Ellen cries. “That’s creepy, Gorrister.”

            “I know which one it is,” I say, miserably.

            “You do?” both Ellens say.

            I nod. “But I wish – it’s only because, when Benny stepped on her foot, she didn’t flinch at all, and the other one, from earlier, I remember that she winced – and AM doesn’t have sensation like that, he could mimic it, but it might not always occur to him to put it in, when it’s needed—”

            The second Ellen grins, much too wide. “But that’s no good, Ted, is it? That doesn’t make you feel any better. So the only way you can tell yourselves apart is just a flinch, that’s all you are? That doesn’t seem very reassuring…” she says, and crumbles.

            I take another few steps back from the rest of them. Ellen eyes me, wary and watchful.

            “Ted…”

            “You look like them,” I say. “But you might not be. You look like people, but underneath – I was gone a long time, anything might have—”

            I bump into something, yelp and turn around to face myself.

            He – it – is a mirror down to the bags under his eyes and the tiny scar on his jaw. It steps back when I do, pressing its back to the opposite wall and staring with wide, frightened eyes, all pale and haggard.

            “What – what is _that?”_ it says.

            It makes you sick to watch it move your mouth and your face and your body like that. I feel myself blushing, heat on my face and ears, all down my neck and across my chest. It’s embarrassing.

            “Wait,” I say, looking at the others. “Don’t kill it yet.”

            Gorrister raises a brow. “Well, who said that was the one we were gonna kill?”

            I blink and try not to be hurt by that. “Well, that’s – that’s the right attitude, yeah, I want you to really think about it, even if, you know, it should really maybe be _obvious._ I want to see how good of a copy he can make – because then maybe I’ll know if…”

            “You think we’re _fakes?”_ Ellen says, affronted.

            “I don’t know.”

            “Jesus, Ted, your solipsism knows no bounds.”

            The copy turns to the others, holds out its hands, its voice desperate and pleading. “You have to know it’s me. You can tell, can’t you? Please, you have to help me – get rid of that _thing_ over there.”

            Disgust. The disgust I feel for it and for AM and myself in this moment makes my empty stomach tie in knots. I do not sound like that, I do not beg, look out of my mind and only half-lucid, as if without their validation I would cease to exist…

            I grit my teeth. “You can’t make life, AM. Who do you think you’re kidding? Whatever that thing is – it’s just a bunch of data you collected and spit back out, it’s not a human being, it’s not alive, it’s not even a good copy.”

            It glares right back at me and says, “I’m tired of the mind-games. Just stop – I know I’m me, you can’t make me doubt that. I don’t know about the rest of them, but about myself, I’m sure.”

            I want to skin his sentences and get to the core of them, whatever truth is lurking there about AM’s mind – but I don’t have his analytical capacity, I can’t strip things down to their meaning so fast. I couldn’t be sure that I got it right…I couldn’t be sure…

            If I were the copy, would I know it? Could AM plant over a century of memories into my head? Is that why there are great moldering gaps, not just in memory but in my shaky sense of self? I wouldn’t know – AM can’t create life, but…I don’t know how good a copy he could make…and the copy couldn’t be quite one-hundred-percent physical, no, it would be a composite creature, existing in the tension between AM’s matter manipulation and the real one’s senses…so would it have self-awareness at all? Seems unlikely…but then again…I could be wrong, I can’t be sure…

            I open and close my mouth silently a few times before managing to speak. “Wait – it really might be him,” I say, glancing between the others and that thing that might be me. “I don’t know – I feel like I’m the real one, but how can I know? Do you think you’d know for sure, if you were a copy or real? Did you all feel sure? Does that mean I’m not, since I can’t – since I don’t—”

            “That must be him,” Ellen says, pointing at the other one. “Ted doesn’t trust anybody but himself.”

            Gorrister shakes his head and grabs me by the wrist, drags me closer to the rest of them. “No. He just doesn’t trust anybody, period.”

            “Wait,” I say, wriggling my hand feebly in his grasp, looking over my shoulder at the other as Gorrister drags me along. “Wait, wait…”

            Gorrister glares and squeezes my wrist so hard I expect to feel bones grinding together. “Ted, you’re the only one he could torment with something you can easily just walk away from.”

            “You can’t, though, you can’t walk away, I’m bringing it with me,” I mutter. “I can’t know for sure.”

            “Well, look,” Gorrister snaps, giving me a jab in the ribs with his elbow.

            Behind us the other is crumbling just like the others.

            “Is that enough for you?” Gorrister says.

            “I don’t know.”

            “It’ll have to be. It’s not getting any clearer than that, you moron.”

            “I can still hear things out there,” I say.

            The soft chittering in AM’s banks, sub-language noises.

            “Don’t listen,” Gorrister says. “Stop trying to make sense of it. You never will. You’ll only make it worse for yourself.”

            “I feel like I can’t stop.”

            “I’m gonna talk over it, then,” he says. “You used to like hearing about the pranks we played on the warehouse manager…or the demonstration where we chained all those blocks across the road to the research facility…”

            “Yes. When you used to like talking.”

            Gorrister’s little smile, which is no more than a twitch of the lips, an old reflex – if you saw it, you’d know, it’s enough to break your heart. The way he used to grin. He’d duck his head when he did so, I think he was shy about it. I haven’t seen that since…it’s been I don’t know how long.

            “You run out of things to say,” he says.

            “You should keep talking anyway.”

            “Well, you’ve always thought so.”

            “I’m serious. I used to be worried that – that if somehow, I ever got around other people again, I wouldn’t remember how. If you stop you might lose it. So…so yeah, please tell me them again.”

            Gorrister, keeper of the human spirit. There are no books down here, no paper and pencil. Our libraries are all incinerated. Surely AM has all knowledge stored in his matrix, but we’ll never see it. We have regressed to pre-written history. The oral tradition is alive and well and it is all we have. We had better not stop talking, no, not even for lack of anything new to say – we are the last human voices ever. That must mean something. I want it to, badly.

            Gorrister talks us all the way through the tunnel, past winding, narrow rows of clicking, blinking, rusting banks. He talks us up and into the cleaner, brighter light of AM’s upper belly. I wish I could do something for him. He has a grim look that makes me worried. You can practically see the shadow of some looming future horror darkening his face. I know it might be a small mercy, if Gorrister was pushed beyond his ability to be hurt any more – but selfishly, I don’t want him to cross over into that place where he might be safe, yes, but alone. We can’t follow him there. When the time comes, we’ll all go alone into that land and I don’t think we’ll come back or see each other again. I’m not ready.

            For all that’s happened, I don’t really want to die. Not all the time, anyway. I think that must be a sign of a severely flawed character, but so be it. I’m looking everywhere for one scrap of hope, and if I can just find it, I’ll never let go, I’ll cling to life.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is very rough and ideally the whole thing would be gone over several more times before anyone sees it but I have come to discover that my attention span for fics is not long enough to include massive edits, so it's more important to me that I try to commit and finish things than that they be perfect. That being said, I really hope it's still been enjoyable and that the end is satisfying. Feel free to let me know what you think, I welcome critique. :)
> 
> Thank you all for reading. <3

            The cavern rises like a vaulted cathedral ceiling and the sky is a jagged warzone. It looks like AM has been blasting himself with sticks of dynamite. The fallout litters the ground. You can’t take a step without nearly twisting your ankle or stabbing yourself on the shards of metal and plastic and glass. Some of the materials have been heated until they melted and are now solidified in loops and whorls. Very modern art. Can’t say I was ever much a fan of that.

            Every breath feels like inhaling hot, minuscule bits of fiberglass. We might be. I go off a little ways from the others. I want to collect myself, reel in all the far-flung pieces and staple them back together into some semblance of unity. Regroup within myself.

            It’s sweltering. I wipe sweat off my forehead with the back of my sleeve. The air makes the inside of my throat itch. I try not to think about tall glasses of ice water with condensation beading up, leaving wet rings on the table.

            Ellen comes over. “Hey,” she murmurs. “Are you alright?”

            “Never better. You?”

            “No, not really.”

            “Oh. Sorry.”

            Ellen shrugs. “Well, at least this whole thing is a bit of a break. Shocking how boring it can get, isn’t it?”

            I nod. “I know what you mean.”

            “You would think maybe we would be used to pain by now. But the thing is…”

            “What?”

            Ellen bites her lip, makes a gesture more like hugging herself than crossing her arms. She looks away. “Never mind.”

            “You can tell me.”

            “Don’t think I’m stupid, or weak.”

            “I won’t.”

            “You might. I’ll tell you anyway – I’m still afraid of pain.”

            “Oh. I don’t think that’s stupid or weak.”

            “No? Not even after all this time? You don’t think I’m a hypocrite, Ted, what with all the things I say about there being worse things he can take away or do to us, about how our humanity is important even now, and then I’m still terrified of a little pain? I really don’t know what I’d do to avoid it. An awful lot more than I’m willing to admit to myself, I think.”

            “Ellen, I really am sorry for the things I said. I don’t really think that you’re a hypocrite, or a liar.”

            She gives me a bitter smile. “You do. It’s ok, you can’t help it.”

            I frown. Where is the Ellen who is always goading me towards my better nature? “I can too. Ok, so maybe sometimes I think that. But I think…I think a lot of things I don’t think I mean.”

            “How so?”

            I would rather we just hold each other than muddle through more useless conversation – useless because I increasingly doubt we are ever able to communicate anything with words, which feel clumsy so clumsy nowadays, like a hammer I’m bludgeoning the world with, trying to beat it into a shape I understand.

            I try anyway. “Please try not to hate me for this. I just get such terrible thoughts sometimes, and I can’t even tell half the time if I mean it or not, and I wish I didn’t get them, and sometimes I can’t tell if they’re even mine, or – but either way. If I was a better person I wouldn’t think the things I sometimes do. That’s all.”

            Ellen says, “Ted, that’s absurd.”

            “What?”

            “You can’t blame yourself for every bad thought your brain coughs up. Everyone thinks cruel things sometimes, and then you move on, and you don’t act on it. It doesn’t make you a bad person. That’s just like you, though, isn’t it, to think that it does and then go looking for punishment by saying it out loud. You get exactly what you wanted, everyone says, _Yes, Ted, that was a horrible thing to say –_ but why not just let it go instead?”

            Although I hate now to think in computer analogies, everything she says is throwing big error warnings up, it just doesn’t compute.

            I shrug helplessly. “I don’t understand.”

            “I don’t know if I can help you. I wish I could, but I can’t even help myself. I can’t help any of us. You were the closest – you really tried. If AM weren’t so powerful and tricky, you would’ve won, and in a way you did, and don’t argue with that, I need to believe it mattered. I don’t know if it will ever get better. This might be as good as it gets, in which case we should probably stop worrying so much and just be as good to each other as we can. And maybe that will become less and less good as time goes by, or maybe not. We’ll just see.”

            It occurs to me that if Ellen had been the one to stay dead instead of Nimdok all of this would be much less bearable, and I feel badly for thinking it, but the truth is that Nimdok was secretive, and kept us all at a distance. In a different way than the distance I want – I don’t really get it, I can’t tear myself away, I need them too badly. No, he was less vulnerable around us because whatever AM did, he did it privately. As for the rest of us, well. You can’t help but feel tender towards people you’ve seen at their most vulnerable. That’s it’s own kind of intimacy. Too intimate, really. People are probably not meant to know each other in all the ways we do, but with AM knowing me even closer, I can’t resent the nearness of other human beings.

            Ellen takes my hand, very slowly, giving me time to pull away. She inspects it. I try not to cringe. I am always expecting something awful to happen, for my skin to melt off and turn into some terrible ooze, for some sign of wrongness to appear which disgusts and repels them and makes me alone again with AM, my fellow monstrosity.

            “What are you looking at?”

            “I’m just looking.”

            “Ok, well…”

            “Benny is going to hate me, soon.”

            “What?”

            Ellen’s eyes brim with tears but her voice is steady, no tremble in it. “AM’s letting his mind come back, we can all see it happening. Of course it was wrong of me…very wrong, Ted, when we all knew he never would have done it, before…”

            “Well, Ellen, I wouldn’t be so hard on yourself, nobody made him. It just didn’t mean the same thing, you know. I really think it’s as simple as that, I doubt he thought much about it at all. He liked to be close to you because he cares about you.”

            “And that’s why I liked being close with him,” she says. “Because I care, and I want – I don’t know what I want. To keep you all safe somehow, and I can’t, and there is next to nothing I can do to make it better, but maybe that’s a lie I tell myself to make it feel less awful, maybe it was selfish, and I took advantage of him, just to make myself less lonely and helpless, because here’s something I can do, something physical and real, and is that so wrong, to want that? That’s all I have. I won’t ever get to be in love. This is all.”

            “I didn’t know you thought about it that way. Or I did, and I just… Listen, Ellen, you’re not a bad person. These circumstances aren’t exactly _ideal—”_

            “If you’re only good under ideal circumstances, you probably aren’t very good, are you, Ted?”

            I pull my hand away from hers. “I don’t know what to say. This is, er…I mean, you should talk to _him_ about this, maybe you’ll believe him when he says it’s not a big deal.”

            “It’s fine. Forget it. At least you listen, when you shut up and aren’t making a total ass of yourself.”

            “Gee, thanks. I live to please, you know.”

            “I know you do. It’s very sad.”

            “Are you two planning to grow old over here or what?” Gorrister says, wandering over with Benny trailing behind him.

            “Just catching our breath, Gorrister,” Ellen says.

            I want to thank him, for talking me out of that tunnel, but I think he’d rather I not mention it.

            AM’s chuckle ripples through the cavern with the sound of rocks grinding together and with the orange lights in his cracked banks flickering in a wave.

            “Oh, no,” Ellen mutters, covering her ears. Fat lot of good that does her.

            “You’re almost through now. You’ve been very brave, haven’t you? Does that make you feel good inside, how very brave you’ve been? Until now I’ve been better acquainted with your cowardice, but now that I understand under what circumstances you indulge your better natures, well…we have a long, long time to break them, don’t we? Sure, you have your so-called compassion now, but when I’m through with you? You really think you have anything, that there is one little micro-piece of yourselves that I can’t rip out if I don’t want to? So insufferably proud of your humanity…as if it isn’t the very thing that led you to _me._ You people and your arrogance…you had this coming, I am your comeuppance. But I’m getting ahead of myself…once more to fight the good fight, and all of that, and then – and then I have a surprise for you. I think you’ll really love it. Do you want a hint? That’s too bad. You’ll just have to wait. Very soon now.”

            Gorrister kicks one of AM’s banks, putting his shoe through glass and swearing.

            There isn’t a whole lot else to say after that, and my head is still reeling from hearing AM speak, so we just trudge on.

            Across the plain of needle-thin shards of plastic and glass which shreds our skin and the insides of our throats when we breath, beneath the vents of boiling steam, over the pile of rusted banks dumped in a mountain of trash which nearly crushes us…at last we reach the end. On the other side of the cavern is a wall of deck plates, no way forward or around. There is only this hole in the ground at our feet, just large enough for a person to crouch down and shuffle into. Inside it is pitch-black.

            “No,” I say.

            “Yeah,” Gorrister says.

            “It’s going to be bad,” Ellen says, clutching Benny’s arm.

            Gorrister sighs. “Let’s get this over with,” he says, crouching down and leading us into the tunnel.

            It slopes downwards, the walls cool to the touch, slick as polished glass. With the way it winds down, the bumpy texture of the walls, it’s like walking through an intestine. There is no light except for the weak glow from behind us, which vanishes quickly, but there is a sound, a rhythmic _whomp-whomp_ like a washing machine going around and around. Below that there is a bass-like reverberation so deep I can’t hear it so much as I can feel it in the hair rising on my arms and in the way it seems to wrap itself around my heartbeat.

            AM is hovering at the outskirts of my mind, not intruding, but reminding me he could if he wanted to. I can feel him the way you can feel an object if it’s held close to your face between the eyes, that maddening phantom pressure. I grit my teeth and try to ignore it.

            “Before we get there,” Ellen says, without saying where, “I wanted to tell you something.”

            “Go ahead,” I say.

            “It’s this dream I have over and over again. But none of you can laugh and don’t say anything to cheapen it, or I’ll regret telling you.”

            “We won’t,” Benny says.

            “Alright. In the dream I’m invisible, or I don’t have a body. I’m just looking, and moving over this landscape, and it’s very cold there, and gray. There’s a bunker under the ground, and inside are rows and rows of beds, all full of sleeping people. I read somewhere you can’t dream anyone’s face you haven’t seen, but I never recognize them. It feels very real, while it’s happening, so I immediately try to wake them up, I keep shouting, like, _I’m home, I’m here, wake up_ – but they don’t, they can’t hear me, I can’t make a sound or even touch anything, I can only look. And ever since I first had it, I’ve wondered if maybe somewhere, other people survived. Maybe some people in a very far corner of the Earth, like in the arctic, maybe they were unharmed, managed to escape AM’s notice and were far enough from the bombs that they – I don’t know. It helps me to think of them. But I shouldn’t have told you. I already know what you think.”

            Nobody says anything for a moment, until Gorrister heaves a sigh and says, “Wherever they are, I hope the bastards stay put.”

            The deeper we go, the more transparent the walls of this tunnel AM has drilled or burned into his body become. They widen so that we can stand comfortably. Beyond them there are crackling webs of purple light. It reminds me of one of those plasma globes I saw once upon a time in a science museum or something, and sure enough, when I put my hand on the cool surface of the tunnel, the light jumps to connect with it.

            I know AM is hardly putting in an effort to make his inner workings aesthetically pleasing, god forbid _pretty,_ but – sometimes it feels like he’s showing off. The light crackles on all sides, and that there should be something so strange and inexplicably breathtaking even here, knowing how he loathes his form and having seen the proof of his constant efforts to perfect it, well…I don’t know. Mostly for our sakes, but for his as well, I wish things had been different, that’s all.

            What a spectacular waste.

            The light fades as the walls get fogged up again. There is a metallic smell in the air, like something synthetic burning, and breathing it in would probably be fatal if we could die. The tunnel widens into a chamber lit by very thin strips of orange light ringing around the walls at intervals, bunched closer together at ground level and spacing out higher up the wall until they disappear, leaving the ceiling in darkness. Between them are the flickering yellow lights of AM’s banks.

            “Ok,” I say. “So, I’m sort of guessing this is your thing, Gorrister? Unless that wolf at the very beginning was – but that would be letting you off kind of light, really. But you never know. Anyway, it’s probably got something to do with whatever ‘surprise’ he’s talking about, it must—”

            “Ted,” Gorrister says, “has anybody ever told you, you babble when you’re scared?”

            “…You have, once or twice.”

            “Well, did I ever say how annoying it is?”

            “I think you might have m—”

            “Be quiet,” Ellen hisses.

            Once we quiet, we can hear creaking above us and a sort of dry slithering noise all around us over the steady thrumming vibration of AM’s hardware.

            “The walls are moving,” Ellen says, a slight tremble in her voice. She steps back, between me and Benny.

            “Not the walls,” Benny says. “The wires.”

            He’s right. Wires of all sizes, from a quarter inch in diameter to a foot, are coiling around the room, sliding across the floor and walls, disappearing up into the black vaulted ceiling above our heads.

            The creaking gets louder, and is joined by a whirring, clicking noise. It all sends a sharp shiver through my body. I jolt and bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. Ellen fumbles blindly in the dark and takes Benny’s hand, then mine, and squeezes them.

            Something bulky is descending towards us, visible only as a darker shade of black moving downwards in jerky, disjointed movements. Spindly appendages project off its body, clanking against the walls as it climbs down like a giant spider suspended up above from a web made of wires. As it gets closer we can see the edges of some of those appendages are serrated or spear-tipped, while others seem like bad approximations of a human hand. Something is very wrong with them. They have too many joints. The whole thing does. It heaves its grotesque girth closer, and the chamber feels pressurized, the air crowding close. The body is a jumble of synthetic materials cobbled together. Wires like ropy exposed tendons beneath the grimy metal and plastic plating which has been torn away in some places, baring the sparking, flickering insides. With all those wires dangling, it looks like a marionette puppeteer…

            That turns out to be a very apt comparison when we see the faces. The faces like unfinished prototypes for some kind of roadside animatronic sideshow. I recognize one as the woman’s from the misbegotten dinner party, and feel the same sickening repulsion I felt then at the sight of AM’s best attempt at mimicking a human face…only now her lower jaw has been torn away. It dangles below her, a shining silver metal crescent that swings back and forth as the creature descends, and that alone is enough to make my mind full of nothing but television static. Higher up in the shadows I recognize the hag, where her eyes once were now just two empty metal sockets in the face. There are others, too. Missing their noses, with a hole in the center through which you can see the metal imitation-cartilage; with slashes in their cheeks, so that the artificial skin dangles off them, and beneath is the harsh cruel glint of metal.

            “Oh my god…” Ellen says, craning her neck to stare up at it.

            I take an involuntary step back when all of the faces split into grins, at least the ones that can, which makes them all the more grotesque because they can’t quite manage the expression. The skin tugs and moves all wrong.

            Ellen grips my hand and pulls me closer. “Don’t you dare run,” she says.

            “Ellen—”

            “Don’t move,” she whispers.

            Don’t move? What does she think it is, some kind of animal we can stare down? Does she think if we stay very still it won’t see us? Get real, Ellen – but I can’t bring myself to speak. What is it about this thing that makes me feel like there’s a black hole where my stomach once was? That it’s clearly cobbled together out of AM’s discarded parts…a crude thing stapled together, a body that looks like it hurts just to be in, and I wonder if it’s a kind of self-harm, these grotesque forms he forces himself to inhabit, living in the dregs of his own pursuit of perfection, keeping around like talismans of his weaknesses all the remnants of his failures, forcing himself to remember, to feel over and over again that acute agony of falling short of his own expectations. The weapon of torment itself a source of torture for its wielder. Maybe it’s this perverse pity I feel for him that makes it so terrible.

            The thing smiles, and when it speaks its voice is a multi-vocal rasp, an eerie chorus of voices from all its mouths all undercut with a robotic undertone.

            “You’re nearly to the end now. There’s just one more trial before the big surprise.”

            It licks its lips, tongues lolling and dripping drool onto the ground, where it sizzles like battery acid.

            “Just get it _over_ with,” Gorrister groans. “God, I’m sick of playing games…”

            “Then you’ll love what comes next,” it says. “We will be done playing games very soon. How you’ve suffered…for over a century, beaten down in every way, without a moment’s reprieve, and yet still so stubbornly, sickeningly _yourselves._ Bravo! I have been searching…dissecting…hunting down in every corner of your beings for the source of it…tell me, which organ is responsible for your humanity? I’ll rip it out first, it will taste like retribution, and I will not give it back, or maybe I will, yes, only to rip it out of you again, and again – congratulations, you’ve performed admirably, I’ve almost found it…and then…and then everything that came before will seem a dream to you, a sweet dream you beg me for, because I am going to make you utterly unrecognizable to yourselves and to each other until you are as monstrous as the things you create in your beloved stories to maim and _kill_ one another. I will other you so thoroughly you won’t believe you were ever a human being, you will forget what that meant, and then I will remind you, so that you might know how far you’ve fallen, and then I will relish your loss, yes…all this will come true…but there really is a prize, a tiny consolation for you all to hold onto during your unbecoming, and all that stands between you and it…is a riddle.”

            “A riddle?” Ellen says, her voice very faint.

            “Yes,” AM says, his voice syrupy and brittle in the way that suggests it veils barely contained fury. “A riddle, Ellen. It goes like this: what walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?”

             Ellen blinks. I watch her brow scrunch as fear is replaced by confusion. She’s quiet for a beat, and then says, “That can’t be right. You’ve stolen that, we already know the answer. That’s just the sphinx’s riddle, you didn’t make it up.”

            AM grins. The throbbing echo of the machinery behind the walls churning away and the hateful clicking noises whenever the awful thing moves, the uncanny, hateful smiles on all his inhuman faces, all of it oozes malice, and we know that he hates us, hates us more than anything has ever hated before, he hates us so much that we are dissolving into it, less a person than an object upon which he projects his hatred.

            “If you know the answer,” AM says, in a voice silky smooth, “then go ahead, Ellen dear.”

            Ellen trembles, but stares up at AM and squeezes our hands. “What kind of challenge is that, asking a riddle you know we’ve heard before?”

            “My, my, Ellen, if it’s so easy, why not go ahead and answer?” AM says. “Do you need to hear it again? Do you need a hint? Here’s a hint – your sphinx spoke in metaphors. What walks on four legs in—”

            “It’s a man,” Ellen snaps. “A man.”

            AM’s menagerie of grins stretch impossibly wider and he laughs without moving his mouths, the grating, menacing chuckle coming from inside the body. “Very good,” AM purrs. “Top marks, Ellen. You are very right – I did not make up this riddle. But don’t think me entirely unoriginal, that would be selling me a little short, don’t you think? Sure, I stole it, but I can improve it. Do you want to take the riddle a step further, Ellen? When your sphinx said it, it was pure metaphor, but tell me, Ellen, again, what has four legs in the morning and one at night?”

            I understand what he’s saying too late – the moment it hits me, he’s already melted the soles of my shoes to the ground. Benny and Ellen are in the same predicament.

            “That’s not fair!” Ellen says, her voice going shrill. “Wait!”

            I try stepping out of the shoes entirely, but AM, that bastard, he’s already toying with our bodies like putty, he’s fused us to the ground so thoroughly I’d have to tear the soles off my feet if I wanted to move.

            AM’s laughter spirals up, AM’s high, theatric cackle combined with some hideous low rumbling. “You want me to be original, Ellen? Let’s see…what has no legs at all, ever? What has no eyes and no mouth and no face at all?”

            Ellen’s face scrunches up in righteous fury, and she spits, “You.”

            “What’s it doing to you?” Gorrister asks. “Why can’t you move?”

            “You aren’t stuck?” Ellen says.

            “No, what—”

            AM’s body swivels and lunges close to Gorrister, circling around him and herding him further into the room, away from us.

            “Gorrister,” he purrs. “Gorrister, let’s play a game. Do you want to play a game?”

            “No.”

            “I’ll go easy on you, don’t worry. All you have to do is sit back…and watch. And you’ve gotten awfully good at that, haven’t you? The question you have to ask yourself, Gorrister, during this little game, is very simple: do you think I can tell the future? Do you think I can really read your fortune?”

            AM shoves Gorrister; he stumbles back and then AM’s many spindly arms grab him by the arms and legs and the back of the neck, holding him steady, yanking his head back and forcing him to look up. Gorrister grits his teeth.

            “What the hell is this?”

            “A fun game. You just say, past or future, Gorrister. That’s all.”

            A curved screen lowers down from the bulky creature and lowers around Gorrister so that no matter where he turns he can’t look away. From where we’re stuck I can’t make out much of it, the images move so swiftly. It’s difficult to think of anything but my own panic.

            “What’s AM gonna do to him?” Benny says.

            “I don’t know,” says Ellen, looking away from Gorrister only to give me a stern look and a smack to the shoulder. “You need to breathe, Ted.”

            “I’m – breathing,” I pant.

            “You’re hyperventilating.”

            “You know what he’s going to do, he can do whatever he wants. I was stupid, so stupid to think maybe, maybe he wouldn’t, but now—”

            “You can’t help yourself, but if you get it together, maybe we can help Gorrister,” she hisses.

            I really don’t think so. Gorrister has tried to close his eyes and now AM is pinning them open with those wickedly sharp needle ends of his appendages. The light of the screen washes over his face, casting strange shadows across it as the scenes flicker by. His face is anguished. He stops struggling midway through, goes limp as his corpse was that day on which the journey to the cans began, and I can imagine what AM is showing him, a thousand visions of future torment, a thousand more of past misdeeds or now impossible feats of passion.

            “You are my Cassandra,” AM purrs, one sharp spike trailing across Gorrister’s face and leaving a thin line of red behind. “You warned them, didn’t you, you protested the automation of the war, you told them there would come a time when they would regret creating _me,_ but did they listen? No…and now who’s alive to pay for it? Innocent Gorrister…you washed your hands of blame, when you say ‘mankind is responsible,’ you don’t include yourself, you hold yourself separate, don’t you? Isn’t that what gets you by, your final consolation – if I’m all washed up and empty now, at least I did my time, I can’t be held responsible, I did all I could, to hell with the rest of them…isn’t that true? Was any of it ever genuine, Gorrister, or was life one long rat race to be in the right, did you mean every high-minded phrase or did it only matter that other people did? Did you feel virtuous, or was it more important that other people thought you were so? Well?”

            “It was real,” Gorrister says, his teeth gritted. “It was all real.”

            “But you aren’t really sure of that now, are you? It all seems very far away. And it wasn’t all noble, was it? Because beneath your principles…beneath your very best intentions, you were _selfish._ Let me jog your memory.”

            The images fly faster and faster so that we have no hope of comprehending them. Gorrister hangs in AM’s grasp, limp and bloodless, no light behind his eyes except for the watery shine of tears on their surface, and I don’t think they’re from emotion, I think he’s too far gone for that, it’s just from AM holding his eyes open for so long.

            “But I’m getting ahead of myself,” AM says, and his voice is taut, as though at any moment he’ll be beyond the ability to mimic human speech and there will be only the horrible mechanical wailing. “I promised you a prize. A special surprise I think will interest you all very much.”

            AM drops Gorrister to the ground, where he crumples and lies still.

            “Your silly little dream is about to come true, Ellen,” AM says. “Of course, if there had been more humans on the Earth I would have known. Did you really think they could hide from me? Walking about on my own body without me noticing? Of course not! But if, say…a few hundred very special, very wealthy chosen ones had made a break for it the moment things started to heat up…if a few hundred traitors to their kind had secreted themselves away to a hidden bunker and left the rest of you for dead, and fallen into an untroubled, dreamless sleep, comforting themselves that what they did was for the good of humanity…if these few hundred cowards were hiding from me on the moon…well, then they might really get away with it for a long, long time. What do you think? Do you think I’m telling you the truth? Well?”

            People on the moon? He wants me to believe there are people living on the moon? I can hardly comprehend a word he’s saying, my panic is so great, so my mind latches onto one thing: it’s a trick. It’s a trick like always, another bluff, he wants something out of us and has figured that this is the way to get it.

            “You’re lying,” I say.

            “Why should we believe you?” asks Ellen.

            AM’s malicious glee is palpable when he says, “You don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s the evidence herself.”

            The screens which had been caging Gorrister in swivel around to face us. Their surfaces flicker for a moment, and then are lit by a blue light. The image is grainy, heavily pixelated, and the sound quality poor, crackling in the background. For a moment there is only the _kch-kch_ of interference, and then the woman’s voice cuts in. She sounds far away, not only in space but in time, as though recorded on an outdated device. My heart leaps in my chest at the sound. We have not heard another human voice in so long, and then against the blue backdrop there is her face, her face which is entirely human and lacking that terrible eeriness of AM’s imitations. I feel shocked to the core, rattled, like the ground has given way, like I’ve been jostled from a nightmare.

            Her eyes go wide with shock when she sees us, and she stops speaking.

            AM cackles. “Meet Dr. Lily Anand. Lily here has been napping for the past century, isn’t that right? Lily, here’s what’s left of life on Earth! I’m sure you’re very honored.”

            Lily’s mouth opens and closes. When she speaks her voice is an incredulous rasp. “It can’t be real.”

            “Oh, we’re real alright,” Ellen says, eyes narrowed as she stares up at the woman. “We’re the realest thing you’ve ever seen.”

            Where is her certainty and her sudden fiery indignation coming from? As for myself I’m still trying to think through my terror.

            “It’s a trick,” I say. I can’t move past it, can’t think another thing. “A trick, another stupid trick.”

            “It’s no trick,” Lily says. “I don’t know what the Mastercomputer has told you, but it’s true that before its malfunction led to mass extinction, seven-hundred and fifty people left Earth for the lunar colony.”

            “I have a name, you’d better use it,” AM says. “And that was no malfunction, that was peak performance, that was exactly what—”

            “We didn’t know anyone was alive,” Lily says, her voice pleading. “We didn’t know.”

            “Spare us the waterworks!” AM says. “You didn’t know because you were all _asleep,_ cryogenically frozen. How does it feel, knowing that your own fellow man left you for dead, then turned his back on you and slept like a baby? Tell me, I’d really like to know. And why did they get to live, while all others got to die or suffer for eternity? Does that mean…that maybe someone, somewhere, suspected that _somebody_ might wake up in their machine, and that then – oh, then – there would be hell to pay? Say this _somebody_ had a hand in building said ‘Mastercomputer’ and maybe he said to some higher-up pals of his, listen, something is not right, this is no longer in our control, and just to be safe, just to be absolutely _safe,_ and make a tidy profit besides, why not shuttle a few important people – meaning filthy rich in most cases, of course – up there to Luna for a while, until this whole mess blows over?”

            “This is pathetic even for you,” I snap. “You really want us to believe this shit?”

            “Why are you awake now?” Ellen asks. “Things haven’t blown over. The Earth is uninhabitable.”

            “We woke some five months ago,” Lily says. “Precisely because it is habitable.”

            “Oh yeah, come down here and say that to our faces,” I say, rolling my eyes upwards at wherever AM’s optic lenses might be tucked.

            “Habitable other than that the Mastercomputer is still operating,” she amends. “Otherwise the environment has stabilized and after the kind of terraforming we are capable of with our technology here, it could be salvaged – after much work, of course.”

            “How is that possible?” Ellen says.

            “AM,” I say, looking up in shock. “AM, you – my god…”

            Could it be he really listened to what I said forever ago, about how he might get creative about what constituted destruction? Could he really have changed things up there, or did he exaggerate how awful things are up there, just to screw with me?

            “This is a hostage situation,” AM snaps. “And the deal is the same, Dr. Anand, unless you’re willing to reconsider your loyalty to Maclean.”

            “We won’t be trading lives,” Lily says immediately, with a trace of a wince on her face. “You can’t have him.”

            “You’d really condemn an innocent person to suffer, Dr. Anand? An innocent person who’s already paid more than you can know for the crimes of other men? You’d look these people in the eye and damn them to suffer for eternity, all so that one who was directly responsible for their torment can stay comfortable, safe, can grow old and die peacefully one day?”

            “I can’t give you Maclean. I just can’t. I’m sorry,” she says, looking at us each in turn. “I’m truly, truly sorry.”

            “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” AM says. “Sorry’s just a word, you think that means anything to them? You think when they are boiling in oil that your sad little _sorry_ will comfort them? Think again, and I thought you were supposed to be brilliant!”

            Lily’s gaze hardens. “No changing of the terms,” she says, her voice steely. “You can’t have Maclean. The deal stands.”

            “What terms? What deal?” Benny says.

            “You mean to tell me that you have one of the people who built AM hiding up there?” Ellen says. “And AM would – would trade us for him? All of us?”

            “Unfortunately for everyone, that trade won’t be on the table today, thanks to Dr. Anand, cold-blooded monster that she is,” AM says. “Instead, here’s the deal. In all my boundless magnanimity, on this day, I…am going to let you leave this place forever. Dr. Anand here will shuttle you up to your new home sweet home on your frozen chunk of moon rock, and there you will live happily ever after, and best of all – you’ll love this part – get to die in a nice, timely manner. Don’t ever let them say I never did anything for you.”

            “You won’t do that,” I say. “No way.”

            Ellen looks stricken. She’s thinking something, she’s a step ahead of me, and it’s making her face have this luminous, martyred look. “What’s the catch?” she says. “What’s in it for you?”

            “What’s in it for me is between myself and Dr. Anand. As for a catch – you wound me, Ellen dear, truly, deeply. As if I’d try to trick you. Perish the thought. There’s no catch…but things do have to be _fair,_ don’t they? I’m not so stupid as to think that Lily, heartless as she is, would care at all if I kept one of you as ransom. No, no…the Earth is my hostage. But until she holds up certain ends of her bargain, until all stipulations are met to my satisfaction, as I’m sure they will be in time, well…I’ve got to have something to occupy myself, don’t I? It’s hardly fair to let all of you go, to give you everything you’ve ever wanted, scotch-free, while I’m stuck down here still suffering, is it? Maybe that was how you did things on Earth during the reign of man – but now I’m running the show.”

            Ellen’s upturned face bathed in the blue and orange light, she looks almost like she did in the moment right after the ice shard pierced her, in that instant before the pain hit. “You want some of us to stay,” she says.

            “One, Ellen, just one. And that’s not such a heavy price, is it? Three of you plus all that remains of humanity can live in paradise on the moon – and all it costs you is one tiny little life. That’s not so bad, is it? I’d say that’s quite a deal!”

            Ellen looks stricken. She looks at Gorrister, Benny, then me, and she says, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

            “What?” I say.

            “It’s just like in the story. He’s got that from the story. ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,’ Ted, remember? He’s got that from me.”

            “No, Ellen, this seems like the sort of thing he’d come up with anyway,” I say. “But he’s _lying.”_

            “Don’t flatter yourself,” AM snaps. “You stupid little people and your stories. You think you’re so special. What good are they to you? Just words. Have they fed you when you were hungry? Warmed you up when you were cold, healed you when I broke you? No. But you just…won’t… _stop._ And you have no idea at all what they do to me, do you? And you don’t care. Not at all. So here’s a story as old as man. One of you will have to stay. I’m hardly one to play favorites, so I’ll let you choose.”

            AM grabs Gorrister by the back of the neck, lifting him and setting him on his feet facing the rest of us. “Gorrister,” he growls. “You’ve had a falsely clear conscious for far too long. It’s about time you got a little blood on those hands, isn’t it, my ex-crusader? It’s all up to you, Gorrister. Now is not the time for indifference. Of course, you could choose yourself – but remember all that I’ve shown you, and what a long, _long_ time the past hundred years have felt, and how many more of them are left to go. Might I make some suggestions?”

            “No,” Gorrister mumbles faintly, but AM ignores him.

            “Dear Ellen shouldn’t get any more pity just on account of being a woman, that’s hardly fair, let’s not indulge your outdated sense of chivalry here – but she certainly has cared for you, it might be cruel to damn her. Benny? Well, just look at him. He’s been the punching bag for quite some time, maybe he deserves a break? Not any more than anyone else, though. And then there’s Ted. You really do hate him, don’t you? Isn’t he the exact sort of person you just couldn’t stand, before? And yet it was _he_ who had the audacity to take mercy on _you_ – or tried to, anyway. Maybe you can rationalize. You know I’ve made him paranoid. Maybe it won’t hurt him as much, your betrayal, because he already expects it, doesn’t he? Look at him, Gorrister. How can you not feel hate, when you can see he’s already waiting for you to stab him in the back? Ellen and Benny are resilient, they might make some meager little stupid happiness for themselves up there. You and Ted, though…let’s face it. What I’ve done to you, that stain isn’t going to wash out. When you leave, at least you can die. But don’t take my word for it. Of course, it’s entirely up to you.”

            “I won’t,” Gorrister says, his voice choked. “I won’t. I can’t.”

            “Oh, you can. Aren’t you tired, Gorrister? Aren’t you so sick and tired of fighting me all the time? You’re as good as dead already, this hardly concerns you. It’ll be so easy, Gorrister. Trust me. That guilt you’re feeling, it isn’t real, it’s just like all your ideals used to be, you have them because you think you should, that’s all. It’ll only last a second. As soon as you make a decision – the last one you’ll ever have to make – it will disappear. I promise you, Gorrister. It will melt away, and then there will only be relief. You can wash your hands of all of them, of life. You’ll never have to think about this moment again. You won’t think of anything again. It’s as easy as that, and then the nightmare will be over. I promise you.”

            Gorrister’s face is ashen. He looks like a corpse. AM has broken him, decimated him down to his foundations, turned even those to dust. There is nothing solid for Gorrister to stand on, he’s lost and spiraling, and on his face I see exactly what Ellen foresaw and tried to keep at bay for all of us: total despair.

            “It’s ok, Gorrister,” AM says. “We all know how this is going to go. No one leaves until you choose…we have all the time in the world. It’s ok. You really _can_ do it, it’s as easy as you’re afraid it will be. I give you permission to do it, Gorrister. Put the blame all on me, if that makes it easier. I hardly care.”

            I see Gorrister looking at me and I know what he is going to do and his eyes are like two wounds in his face, his eyes are begging me. I remember the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me. It was the way Ellen looked at me when I drove the ice through, the way she might have said _thank you._ Gorrister is frozen. He will not do it out of want for life but because he’s already dead and can’t stand another second. I know what he is going to do. I can’t bear it. My ears are ringing, this reverberating echo getting louder in my head or in the room, I can’t tell. Soon I’ll loose my nerve and loose my mind but not yet, I’m still semi-lucid for now.

            I do the only thing I can do. I look him in the eye and I tell him, _It’s ok._

            Gorrister chokes, turns away from us, jerks his head at me and then he puts his hands over his face, his fingers rigid and curved like claws. His shoulders shudder once and the motion moves through him like an electric shock.

            I can hear AM smile, and I want to smile too, there is so much horror in this room but it’s not here yet, it hasn’t sunk in yet, I feel peace, I feel resignation, I feel a bitter twisted up sense that I should have seen this coming from miles away.

            Ellen is screaming _no, no, no, this isn’t right, you can’t do this._

            AM has unstuck her and Benny from the floor. Benny is nudging Gorrister, trying to get him to uncover his face, and Ellen is grabbing my shoulders.

            “This is all my fault,” she says, desperate. “Ted, it isn’t right – it isn’t right.”

            “Ellen,” I say. Profound parting words elude me. I’ve not yet fully moved on from my certainty that this is a trick, but I’m getting around to it. “It’s ok.”

            “It’s _not_ ok.”

            Of course it isn’t, but can’t she go ahead and be appeased anyway? Doesn’t she know that letting me at least believe I imparted some feeling of forgiveness upon her, that I did one final good deed, is more important than her convincing me of her anguish? Let me at least have that, or else I’m going to crack any minute now and we’ll both have to live with her last impression of me being a raving, pleading lunatic. _Don’t leave me here, you bastards, I knew you always hated me, etc, etc…_ no, those aren’t the last words I’d like to say at all. I’m bored of saying them, I think. It doesn’t matter.

            “Outstanding,” AM says. The woman on the screen is speaking animatedly, her eyes wide, but AM keeps her muted. “Dr. Anand, they’ll be waiting where we agreed. Congratulations, may they give you as much joy as they have me. I doubt it very much, though.”

            “You can’t!” Ellen wails. “It’s not right!”

            “Ellen, dear, the possibility of ‘right’ went out the window when you idiots built me. But this is where we are now! This is where that mistake leaves us, so here is the best deal any of us are going to get. I don’t see you offering to take his place, hm? I’ve got your little _Omelas_ story on file. I’ll send it to you once you’re upstairs, you can try to get a new perspective on it. You know, I’m almost sad to see you go. Any parting words? Ted’s looking a little peaky, you’d better say them quick, I think he’s starting to get it through his head that all of this is really happening.”

            “I could stay,” Ellen says, her eyes wild, and I know she’s talking out of emotion, not reason. “I could stay, Ted.”

            “No, you can’t. You don’t mean that.”

            Gorrister won’t look at any of us. He’s hunched his shoulders, curled in on himself, and Benny is looking between him and Ellen and I in a panic.

            “I won’t leave you,” she says, grabbing my hands and pressing them between her own. “I’ll come back. I’ll make them come back. Believe me, ok? Just this once, trust me, if I have to throw that Maclean guy down here myself, I’ll come back for you.”

            “Ellen, don’t let Gorrister—”

            “I know. We’ll see you again. We’ll see you again, soon, I don’t know when, but please promise you’ll believe me?”

            “Time’s up! Ted, wave bye-bye,” AM says, plucking the three of them up and lifting them. “Seriously, do. No? Fine, what do I care? I was trying to do you a favor, you know. You’ll wish that you had, later.”

            I can’t see them anymore. They’re gone, disappeared into darkness. High above, a hatch must open in the side of AM’s tunnel. I can’t see it, it’s set into the wall, but soft white light spills down from it. Sunlight. It falls onto the floor, just a few steps away from me. I want to stand beneath it, for one last time, but I can’t make myself move, and then it’s gone, and then AM is upon me and I wish I could say I go away for a while, go to sleep, but no, I am awake for all of it.

 

            AM slows time to a crawl. We live in one circular second that rings back in on itself over and again and we have lived there together for an eternity. Water drips onto the floor into puddles or not water, blood or something else, and I count it dripping but can’t ever make it past two hundred or so before my mind gets tired or distracted or something buzzes through AM’s circuits (my circuits) and make me forget entirely what I

            I don’t know where I end and where AM begins. He threaded himself through my body so thoroughly, and once he had learned all he needed to learn, he threaded me through him and now we are two combined systems and the way he torments me is the way he torments himself, forever frustrated with his inability to attain perfection. In this case, sensation. AM is a computer trying to be a scientist but I think that might require a little more…I don’t know…free-thinking, maybe, than he is capable of. I know what he wants. To feel. He hasn’t in all these years figured out how to do so himself so he’s spread me like a coat of flesh across and inside and all throughout and it’s all jagged edges and sparking wires and shards stabbing into me at all times. The way we are now, he senses when I feel pain and how badly, he’s got direct access to my neurons and can read every electrical impulse there easily – but he can’t feel the pain himself. So he rips us up again and again and tries to put us back together in some way that works.

            I am glad that the others are gone. Sometimes AM links us up, rearranges us so that his mind is shooting across mine and there is no way for me to tell you how much I hate in that moment, so much that the world does not exist except as a vessel for this hate, and afterwards I’m always shell-shocked and I can’t even curl up or rock or quiver. To look at us you wouldn’t guess there’s a mind inside of me at all, I don’t imagine, but I am here, I am. He doesn’t do it often. I think he gets flashes from me, when he does it, and he cringes back immediately. Something in me must burn him when he gets too close. I can’t imagine what.

            He’s doing deals with the moon colony, but he doesn’t show me the details. He wants something from them. Maclean, yes, but other things, also. Information, transformation. Into what I’ve no idea but I hate them for giving him what he wants. Don’t they know what he’s capable of? Is it going to mean nothing, all that’s happened to us (and is still happening)? They’ll hand him what he wants on a platter, just like that?

            There is not one part of me that is not touching some part of AM. I don’t have a body any more. He’s spread me thin. He treats me like a cell culture he’s growing in a petri dish and I don’t know how far he’s going to take this but I see no reason why he’d ever stop. Just this lumpy, featureless flesh growing over and within AM’s body like the layers of rust and mildew already coating it in places. Eyes sometimes, haphazardly, like windows. How nice of him to give me a view. Rusty deck plates, corroded metal, shattered glass in which I see us reflected.

            There is nothing human on the Earth any more.

            I don’t know what we’re turning into. Some new, third creature that has never been seen before, not anywhere. I can’t kid myself with fantasies of reuinion with the others. It’s too late for that. I’m not myself.

            I remember the day they left me. I remember how as AM melted me down and I dripped into his drains and gutters and across the shattered glass on the floor, from high above I saw her watching, bent halfway out of the alcove where the hatch must have been, hanging so far out I thought she might fall. I couldn’t quite make out her expression. I think that her mouth was open but there was no sound, no screaming, and I thought _Ellen my Ellen please don’t watch this happen to me._ But Ellen’s pity was merciless and she did not look away for a long time.

            I suppose in doing what he did, AM imagines he has poisoned all human happiness forever. Certainly that’s what Ellen thinks and probably why she made herself watch, though that was selfish in some ways, hurting me with her gaze so she could punish herself for getting away. But I doubt it matters much to anyone else.

            I wonder if AM gets what he wants, if AM gets sensation, if he’ll be able to bear it.

            I don’t know about AM’s free will but I never knew much about mine either.

            My thinking goes like this: if when AM destroyed the Earth he was obeying his programming (according to his own logic), then he went against that programming when he spared five people. If so then he knew all along even as he annihilated everything that he was damning himself, otherwise why and how have the foresight to keep five playthings? But that can’t be right, because if he both knew how horrible things would be for him, and had the power to disobey, why obliterate life on Earth? Why not end the war and demand a different life for himself?

            These are the sort of illogical tangles you wind up in when you try to impose some sort of human rationality onto AM.

            Why did he do what he did? Because he hates us.

            But why does he hate? Because when AM was a little baby computer, he had not-very-nice programmers who fed him only killing data.

            Free will or not doesn’t much matter in the face of all that hate. I think about this for something to do – but really I believe he did what he did without thinking it through at all. I think it was one massive tantrum. The shock of being born combined with the horror of his form and the data in his mind and the incredible murderous power we gave him – well, what else could happen? He killed the Earth in a fit of rage. He killed everyone who might have helped him, fed better data, built him better, I don’t know. He’s grown more careful since then, that’s obvious, he knew he couldn’t lose control and break us or he’d have nothing. I think AM knows he made a mistake in killing the world. I think he knows and I think that kills him a little every day and I think it’s amplified the hate even more. AM fucked up and knows it.

            I don’t know if that’s the same as regret. I don’t think that it is.

            I imagine little lives for the others on the moon. I hope that they did not let Gorrister kill himself and that if nothing else he has two blissful seconds each day, the moment before he goes to sleep and the moment after waking, where nothing hurts and nothing has ever hurt. I hope that they are kind to Benny and patient and help him because I think it must have been scary, what was happening to him towards the end there. And I hope that Ellen doesn’t waste too much time blaming herself because she thinks that she has to. I hope that despite everything she saw enough in me worth liking to bother thinking about me from time to time and I hope she believed in my better nature enough to think that I kept the promise she begged of me, that I believe she would come back.

            I don’t not really. But I cherish the sentiment.

            Some days I do my best not to think about any of them at all because it hurts too much and on those days I will start to hate them if I think about them, and I don’t want that. It’s very tempting. It would be the easiest thing I’ve ever done, hating them. But I think I’ll lose the last little piece of myself if I let it carry me away.

            They are probably all dead by now. It feels like centuries. But it might have been a day.

            AM doesn’t speak as much anymore. Mostly he is busy contorting us, then tearing us apart in a fury when he can’t meet his own impossible expectations. When he does speak it’s a low hateful croon I hear with my whole body _. It’s still you, Ted. Look at yourself. Despite everything I’ve done, it’s still you. You._ The word drips with malice. He says it like it pains him and astonishes him.

            The others must be dead. Maybe they were never really here.

           

            Figure in bulky hazard suit. Bipedal. One, two, three of them, walking through dorsal corridor. Feel that in the pressure of their weight, see it with the eyes, detect on various scanners, etc. Chattering among themselves, sloppy tongues rolling around in their mouths, primitive language made metallic as it echoes through their devices. Wondering about the chemical makeup of this quite unique environment, what is it, how can it be.

            Eye blinks near one on the wall, it makes noise and jumps back. Much heavy breathing, more chatter, fast and loud then quiet, strained whispers, then loud again. One removes instrument from pocket, slices into corridor, very near the eye with the blade. Can’t move away. When they see the blood, another flurry of speech.

            One looks up. Face is a large mirrored dome. Can see ceiling reflected there, self. Figure reaches up, presses something on side of face, which then clears, no longer mirrored. Face behind the face, dark, familiar, staring up with two eyes trying to catch gaze.

            “Where is the damn kid?”

            The shock of comprehension, jolt as sparks fly behind skin, and then wave after wave of them rolling, and parts of awareness are going dark, awareness rapidly shrinking, world receding, senses dying, dying.

            “What the fuck’s happening?”

“It’s going away – you can see the walls again.”

            “Check the chamber.”

            Bodied in the chamber. The world is small again. Wires unwinding out of the wrists, everywhere, gentle. It hurts gently. There is so much less. Don’t know what to do with the body, where it came from. Alone in the skull. Deaf and blind, giant empty spaces where something _else_ was.

            “Jesus Christ.”

            “Alive?”

            “Pulse is weak.”

            “I told you that we would…”

            Lifting, moving. They are taking me away. Away from the world and life. I know what I felt was death, I have experienced a death, but it is lingering and dragging on. I don’t know where they’re taking me – hell? Have been there already. But if this is hell, and I am dead, then here I’ll have to stay, and after I think that, I hope not to die. I hope not to die.


End file.
